Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • The view from Ireland

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  • “They cannot protect me because they do not want to offend a certain group of people”

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    Full text:

    Watch the shocking footage of her arrest, where the police, without establishing the facts, arrested and frog marched her through a baying crowd of Islamic men who abused and assaulted her.

    At the police station she was strip-searched, interrogated at 4am and held in a cell for 15 hours. Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, Hatun took legal action against the police and they have now settled the case for £10,000.

    Hatun, who is is a well-known Christian evangelist who regularly critiques and debates the Qur’an said: “The police have repeatedly taken away my rights and told me that they cannot protect me because they do not want to offend a certain group of people.

    “More must be done to properly deal with Islamic violence and intimidation at Speakers’ Corner. We don’t live in Pakistan; we don’t live in Saudi Arabia. I am Christian and by default I believe that Muhammad is a false prophet. I should be allowed to say that in the UK without being stabbed or repeatedly arrested.

    “I am concerned that power has been handed over to Muslim mobs on Britain’s streets, and that there is no coming back from this. “The British public urgently need and deserve better policing.”

    Hatun has given the settlement money to an organisation supporting individuals who decide to leave the Islamic faith and face persecution for doing so.

  • A sinister dystopian nightmare

    Hamas base themselves in hospitals and schools, using civilians as human shields, while Hezbollah have been indiscriminately bombing northern Israel for months, careless of where their missiles land. Israel, on the other hand, devised a plan that would target only Hezbollah members…

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  • Kinky boots

    Germany has recently passed a self-ID law – the snappily-titled Selbstbestimmungsgesetz (SBGG) – allowing anyone to change their legal gender on say-so, without any of that tiresome medical bother. There are complications though. For instance, can a male cross-dresser and foot-fetishist with a history of violent attacks on women be charged with exposing his penis? It's a crime only men can be prosecuted for, and he identifies as a woman. Gosh. Marielena Meder at Reduxx tries to make sense of it:

    The man, 56, is scheduled to stand trial in Bonn for threats and grievous bodily harm related to two incidents, one from 2021 and one from 2022. Due to Germany’s strict privacy laws, the man’s full name has not been released, but he will be referred to as “Klaus” for the purposes of this article.

    In August of 2021, Klaus followed a woman home and attacked her while she was at her front door. Klaus is alleged to have grabbed her from behind and held a knife to her throat while he wrangled her boots off. The woman fought back, suffering cuts to her neck and hands, and was able to send her attacker fleeing thanks to her loud cries for help. Klaus was wearing women’s clothes at the time of the attack, and is said to be a women’s shoe fetishist.

    The next year, in December, Klaus exposed his penis to two women on a train. The regional court in Bonn must now decide whether this was a sexual offense, as Section 183 of the German Criminal Code only imposes a fine or a prison sentence to men for exhibitionistic acts. Because Klaus is legally considered “female,” he may avoid this charge entirely.

    The uncertainty is the result of Germany’s recently-passed gender self-identification law, which is considered by many to be the most relaxed legislation of its kind in the world. In 2022, well-known criminal defense attorney Udo Vetter warned about the impact the law would have on criminal proceedings, writing on social media that: “Section 183 of the Criminal Code only applies to men. If a man uses self-ID to become a woman, he can no longer commit a criminal offense for exhibitionism.” 

    And so, very likely, it will come to pass.

    Klaus has an extensive criminal history stretching back years. According to the General-Anzeiger, which referred to Klaus as a “woman,” a reading of his past criminal record took the court over two hours.

    In October of 2008, Klaus attacked a 52-year-old woman, violently pulling her to the ground and sitting on her so he could rip her boots off her legs. According to a news article on the incident, Klaus admitted to becoming aroused when he put the boots on after fleeing to a nearby forest. During the subsequent police search, investigators found a whole collection of women’s boots at his home. 

    The next year, he attacked a 54-year-old woman who was heading home from carnival celebrations dressed as a female pirate in order to steal her boots. When she fought back, he strangled her, cut her face with a knife, bruised her upper body, and fled. He claimed at the time that he had only been able to commit the assault because he had been allowed to walk free from his 2008 crime.

    Klaus was ultimately sentenced to two years and four months in prison after being convicted of aggravated extortion and grievous bodily harm. At the time, the court also recommended he be confined to a permanent placement in a psychiatric institution after hearing expert testimony from a psychiatrist who labeled him dangerous and at risk of escalating his behavior to more serious acts of violence.

    But then along comes the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz.

    Germany’s new Self-Determination Act (SBGG) comes into effect in November. The law, which was met by overwhelming backlash from women’s rights campaigners, established “gender identity” as a protected characteristic and allows parents to change the sex marker on their children’s documents from birth. The SBGG also creates the potential for citizens to be fined up to €10,000 (approx. $11,500 USD) for revealing a person’s given name and birth sex without their permission – an action that trans activists staunchly oppose and refer to as ‘deadnaming.’

    The SBGG allows individuals to change their legal sex and name without any diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and does not discriminate against those with criminal records. Even convicted sex offenders such as rapists, pedophiles, exhibitionists and voyeurs can easily change their legal sex and first name at a registry office.

    Stopping trans foot-fetishists from being charged with exhibitionism may turn out for women to be the thin end of a very large and unwelcome wedge.

  • Lammy’s new gaffe

    Steerpike at the Spectator on the latest David Lammy blunder:

    It’s a gaffe a day with David Lammy. Now the Foreign Secretary has come under fire after he hailed Azerbaijan for being able to ‘liberate’ territory – in an ongoing conflict widely viewed as an ethnic cleansing operation – in a recent Substack post. Lammy took to his blog to express his unsolicited musings about the Nagorno-Karabakh region, writing:

    "The states of Central Asia look increasingly east and south. Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s. Georgia and Moldova are engaging with Nato and [the] EU."

    Crikey. Talk about bad wording, eh? Mr S would remind readers that Azerbaijan has been locked in an ethnic and territorial conflict with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region – with concern growing after violence restarted in the region last year. Harrowing clips of Armenian civilians being beheaded have spread online, exposing the extent of the violence being carried out by Azerbaijani forces – making the Foreign Secretary’s choice of language all the more baffling.

    Now a prestigious professor has urged the Labour man to retract his comments, blasting them as ‘shockingly callous and ignorant’. Mark Movsesion fumed:

    "Exactly a year ago, Baku ethnically cleansed the region of its 120,000 Christian Armenian inhabitants in violation of an order from the International Court of Justice. Lammy seems to think Azerbaijan, like Ukraine, is trying to free itself from Russian domination. In fact, Azerbaijan and Russia are strategic partners, and Azerbaijan carried out the ethnic cleansing of Karabakh with Russian acquiescence."

    Meanwhile shadow foreign minister Alicia Kearns has called for the Foreign Secretary to clarify what he meant in his ‘vanity blog’, adding:

    "Words matter as Foreign Secretary, especially when opining on conflict.‬ Contradicting long standing UK policy in a vanity blog is totally inappropriate and throws into question the Foreign Secretary’s judgement. David Lammy needs to urgently clarify the Government’s policy on Nagorno-Karabakh. This is a serious matter – over 100,000 people have been displaced from their homes.‬"

    The man is way out of his depth. The first Labour minister to go? We'll see, but I wouldn't bet on it: he's well versed in playing the race card.

  • The vacuous narcissism of the trans movement

    I had a go yesterday. Now here's Jo Bartosch at Spiked on the fourth plinth farce:

    The lump of art unveiled this week on the Fourth Plinth couldn’t be more revealing. For the next 18 months, visitors who pass through Trafalgar Square will be confronted by a cube of 726 pseudo-death masks of ‘trans and nonbinary’ people.

    Each of the casts, moulded from volunteers in the UK and Mexico, face inward towards a void in the middle of the work. This perfectly encapsulates the vacuous narcissism of the trans movement, not to mention the stupidity of the establishment figures who prop it up with obscene amounts of taxpayer cash. In selecting this work, the fourth plinth judging panel has put a spurious cause quite literally on a pedestal.

    This was by no means the intended message. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles created the piece, titled Mil Veces un Instante, to commemorate Karla La Borrada. La Borrada was a trans-identified singer and male prostitute who, like many in Mexico’s sex industry, was tragically killed. Margolles uses her art to highlight the vulnerability of what she terms ‘the trans community’, a cause that arguably has more relevance to those selling sex on the streets of Mexico than to, say, whining nonbinary brats at British universities….

    Of course, according to the woke values of the British art establishment, this new installation ticks every box – the masks are, after all, of brown, poor, transgender sex workers. What judging panel could ask for more? Yet art that is chosen to further the patron’s preferred politics is sucked dry by the process. Granting awards and exhibition opportunities according to the right diversity criteria is the multimillion-pound equivalent of painting by numbers.

    Margolles offers something else the elites think is juicy, too – a tiresome, boundary-pushing edginess that has become a substitute for talent. As a pioneer of ‘corpse art’, Margolles’s studio in Mexico City adjoins a morgue. She even boasts of using fluids from the dead bodies brought in.

    …the choice of Margolles’s ghoulish monument to an overhyped threat points to a moribund future where shock triumphs over substance. In this, it is perhaps best understood not as a memorial to a murdered Mexican male prostitute, but rather as a memorial to the butchered British arts.

  • Moral clarity at the UN

    On the UN resolution that Israel should leave the Palestinian territories:

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    As Einat Wilf says: "Bless the Czechs. They know what it is like to be a small nation bordered by fanatic annihilationist enemies and being thrown by the world under the bus in the name of “de-escalation”, oops – appeasement.""

    The UK abstained.

  • The new fourth plinth

    I suggested, some time ago, that we should be putting up more plinths in Trafalgar Square – a fifth plinth, a sixth plinth, and so on – rather than debating what should go on the current plinths. We could even give them names rather than numbers: the Black Plinth, the Plinth of Wales, the Plinth of Darkness. Alas it never happened, and here we are: the latest fourth plinth addition is  “a memorial to all transgender victims of violence”. *Sigh*.

    From the Guardian:

    Margolles has created this artwork – called Mil Veces un Instante, or A Thousand Times in an Instant – at a time when femicide has reached a staggering scale in Mexico. “Eleven women are killed in this country every day,” the director of Amnesty in Mexico told the Guardian in 2022. “We have at least 20,000 women who are missing in Mexico.” Juárez, where Karla died, is one of the most dangerous places for women in the country. Shouldn’t the vulnerability of trans women in Mexico be seen as part of this wider onslaught on women? Yes, obviously…

    No, obviously. Trans women are men, not women. This work, by depicting men, is a calculated insult to all those murdered and disappeared Mexican women who are, as per usual, ignored and forgotten. 

    Joan Smith at UnHerd:

    There are countries where high numbers of transgender people are killed, and Mexico is one of them. The UK most definitely is not, with some research suggesting that trans individuals are less likely to be murdered than the rest of the population. That’s not the impression created by the 726 faces posed eerily above the fourth plinth, all of them belonging to “trans and non-binary communities in Britain and Mexico”.

    It’s pure propaganda, bolstering the zombie claim — it’s been debunked many times — that transgender people are disproportionately at risk of murder in this country. It’s a foundational tenet of gender ideology, which holds an international transgender day of remembrance each November, making emotional claims about the number of people murdered as a result of “transphobia”. Politicians accept such claims uncritically, especially in the US where the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, marked last year’s day of remembrance with a statement about people who have been “targeted and killed for living authentically and courageously”.

    In an atmosphere where people live in perpetual fear of causing offence, the notion that transgender individuals are braver and more vulnerable than the rest of us is rarely questioned. It ignores the fact that in countries where high numbers of trans people are murdered, the victims are often involved in the incredibly dangerous commercial sex trade. A report in 2019 suggested that 90% of trans-identified males in Brazil depend on prostitution to survive, exposing them to the jaw-dropping levels of violence associated with selling sex.

    In Mexico, 52 trans people were murdered in 2022-23, the most recent year for which figures are available. But 11 women are killed every day in a country where the failure to protect women is a national scandal. In May alone, 335 women and girls were murdered, suggesting that this year’s total could reach 4,000. Thousands of Mexican women and girls are missing, their fate unknown.

    Once again it's the men who win out and get the attention and the sympathy, while the women get nothing.

  • Debunking the systemic racism studies

    John Murawski at UnHerd on the case of the black babies that I posted on yesterday – Why did it take four years to debunk the black baby study?

    A study published this week in a prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, makes a claim that’s almost unheard of on the pages of leading medical journals: systemic racism and implicit bias are not the self-evident explanations for a pervasive racial disparity. To be precise: black newborns aren’t dying at higher rates when they’re treated by white doctors.

    The study, conducted by a Harvard economist and a Manhattan Institute researcher, purports to debunk a widely circulated 2020 study, also published in PNAS, which concluded that black newborns attended by a white physician suffer a “mortality penalty” and are twice as likely to die. That study garnered incriminating headlines in USA Today, CNN, Science News, NPR, and The Washington Post. It was also so influential that it was cited by Supreme Court Justice Brown Jackson in the high court’s 2023 affirmative action case, in which the American Medical Association and 44 other parties declared in their amicus brief: “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug.”

    How could two teams of researchers look at the same data — 1.8 million childbirths in Florida between 1992 and 2015 — and reach diametrically opposite conclusions?

    This time around, the researchers added one key variable that the 2020 researchers had overlooked — low birth weights — and the whole thing collapsed. The research design contained a fatal flaw, overlooking the fact that severely underweight babies, who have very high mortality rates to start with, tend to be treated by white doctors. Physicians who handle the most serious medical cases tend to see higher death rates.

    It’s no exaggeration to say that this level of scholarly error raises serious questions about the hundreds of peer-reviewed studies published in the past five years that documented the prevalence of systemic racism in the medical profession and implicit bias among white doctors. Could the research design of those papers, some of which have been cited hundreds of times in subsequent papers, also have been flawed, so as to advance a progressive political agenda cloaked in the authority of objective science?

    At the peak of the nation’s racial reckoning, between the years 2019 and 2021, the leading journals of the Anglosphere rushed to put out special issues and contrite reflections on anti-black racism and their journals’ institutional complicity in the brutal oppression of African Americans. Scientific American, Science, Nature, Health Affairs, and others assumed that systemic racism and implicit bias operate as natural laws which give researchers carte blanche to interpret all racial disparities as being governed by those laws.

    Medical schools added lessons on critical race theory, intersectionality, identity, oppression, allyship, colonialism, patriarchy, fatphobia, power and privilege to their curricula, taking up time and space previously allotted to cell biology and anatomy. To date, more than 250 governmental bodies and private institutions have declared racism to be a public healthcare crisis, an escalation in urgency that morally justifies the prioritisation of non-whites for medical treatment, from Covid vaccinations to organ transplants, as a means to close the racial disparities gap in healthcare outcomes….

    The medical profession may be in for a reckoning of its own. Hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles are ripe for an independent review that could result in corrections or possibly retractions.

    Ha. Wait till the "gender affirmation" scandal – the medical mutilation of troubled teens – catches up with them. Now that'll be a reckoning for the US medical profession.

  • Operation Grim Beeper

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    Full thread:

    1) This is one of the most astonishing intelligence operations in history. It is a reworking of the story of the Trojan Horse for the digital age, and it deserves to become nearly as legendary as its iconic predecessor. If we are not utterly astounded, it is because we have seen too many James Bond and Black Mirror movies for our own good.

    In real life, operations like this just don’t happen. It is at least four operations in one.

    First, the Israelis thoroughly mapped Hezbollah’s supply chain.

    Second, they invented a special explosive charge small enough to be inserted inside a handheld device, sophisticated enough to be remotely activated, big enough to do real harm, and yet not so prominent physically or electronically to call attention to itself.

    Third, the Israelis turned themselves into a big enough link in Hezbollah’s procurement network to take physical control of the devices and rig them.

    Fourth, they activated the charges simultaneously and across a very wide geographic area.

    If any one of these sub-operations had been botched, the operation as a whole would have fizzled. Who else in the world could pull off such an imaginative, technically sophisticated and audacious plot?

    2) It is the first mass targeted killing in history. Every one of the thousands of persons killed or maimed was selected individually, yet they were hit at the same moment. The great genius of the operation is that the Israelis relied on Hezbollah itself to select their targets for them. I can’t think of another case like this where the attackers just sat back and let the enemy perform a key part of their work for them. If we map the attacked men we map Hezbollah’s org chart, including the blinded Iranian ambassador to Lebanon who is an IRGC officer.

    3) The large ratio of maimings to deaths is a sign of success. In military terms, a maiming is preferable to a death because it ties up more resources and stresses enemy systems to a much greater degree.

    Also it made Hezbollah – who pride themselves on their competence and technical capabilities – look like a bunch of idiots.