Mick Hartley

Lewis Wickes Hine, 1921. "Powerhouse Mechanic and Steam Pump"

[Photo: Shorpy/Lewis Wickes Hine]

Lewis Wickes Hine's iconic paean to manual labour, posted at Shorpy to mark yesterday's Labor Day in the US.

Following on from yesterday's post on the morality police in Germany:

When I say that Germany has its own “morality police,” I am referring to the so-called “Sharia Police,” self-appointed enforcers of Sharia law.

Since I published the video of a Muslim man harassing two women for not wearing “proper” clothing, I have received direct messages… https://t.co/KERrQBaqU6 pic.twitter.com/ZhkJOKeadk

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) September 2, 2024

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When I say that Germany has its own “morality police,” I am referring to the so-called “Sharia Police,” self-appointed enforcers of Sharia law.

Since I published the video of a Muslim man harassing two women for not wearing “proper” clothing, I have received direct messages from many Iranian women, particularly from academia. They share the same concerns about these morality enforcers in European countries but are often silenced and labeled Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, or right-wing.

Whether we like it or not, these Sharia or morality police known as “Amr bi al-maruf” a collective duty of Muslims to encourage righteous behavior and discourage immorality, exist in many European countries. Often linked to mosques, they impose their version of religious law, targeting women and girls for not wearing the “proper hijab.” This mirrors the experiences of women in Iran. In Iran, when Sharia Police violently harass women for not covering their hair, officials often mislead the world by claiming these are just religious groups, not the official police.

Sources in the Muslim community in Germany report that these so-called Sharia Police have appeared in cities like Wuppertal and Berlin, harassing women under the guise of promoting hijab and Sharia laws. This issue extends beyond isolated incidents, with moral enforcers emerging in schools and neighborhoods with Muslim majorities.

Our investigative work is crucial in sparking necessary conversations and actions. I’m confident that if journalists in Germany raise their voices and conduct thorough reports, it will compel the authorities to act. I recall when we urged the German government to shut down the Islamic centers. Initially, we were labeled, but eventually, the government recognized the links to terrorism and regimes like the Islamic Republic. We must continue exposing these threats.

I've no idea if this type of Sharia policing on the street goes on here in the UK (though there was the recent case of a man who assaulted three women in Bradford, calling them "prostitutes" for not wearing traditional dress) but of course the pressure on many Muslim women – from mosques, in their homes – to conform to Islamic dress codes, with hijab or even the niqab, is part of this same dynamic of threats to women if they don't accept their assigned subservience.

We heard about the LGBT Youth Scotland scandals the other day, with Janice Turner wondering why they were still given a pass, despite the revelation of paedophiles within the organisation, and their continued pushing of an extreme trans agenda.

Here's more, from the Sunday Post yesterday:

Child health experts have voiced concerns about the content of controversial LGBT Youth Scotland Coming Out Guides, including one co-authored by convicted paedophile Andrew Easton.

Educational psychologist Carolyn Brown warns that the three LGBT Youth Scotland guides, made accessible to schools across the country, are full of “misinformation” that she brands “manipulative and influencing”….

Brown said: “These guides are unbalanced, unequivocal and clearly not written by any expert. They simply should not be accessible to our schoolchildren.

“They are misleading, grooming and full of product placement that would easily influence vulnerable young people, particularly those who have autism which so many of the target group of this organisation do.

“From start to finish, these guides ­create concern and set out to skew the views of the children and young adults reading it. There is clear evidence they are not written by professionals with expertise in either mental health, ­education or child development.

“They have, instead, been written by individuals who have already been duped by the entirely false and ­unprovable ­concept of transgenderism."

Or by people who are fully aware of what they're doing, and see transgender ideology as a key element in the grooming of young children.

The respected former educational psychologist for Fife Council said: “Even the term ‘Coming Out’ in these guides has been stolen from the gay rights movement from the 80s and 90s when these guides have nothing to do with being gay and everything to do with grooming, confusing vulnerable children and wrecking families.

“The first Coming Out Guide sets out to promote the idea of transgenderism. It contains 44 pages and 99% of those are focused on transgenderism.

“On one of the few pages where being gay is mentioned (page seven), it infers that a teenage lesbian may be ­transgender instead.

“Instead of supporting children and their families to accept and manage the developmental realities of growing up into a healthy adulthood, these guides suggest, as the transgender movement suggests, that there is a magical alternative. This magical alternative is, in reality, a lifetime of psychological misery and medicalisation worth millions of pounds to pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry. Numerous de-transitioners are now testament to this fact.”…

Top Scots paediatrician Dr Jennifer Cunningham, who specialises in autism, also warns of an “almost casual reference” to taking controversial cross-sex hormones in the guides which can not only cause lifelong changes but also life-limiting side-effects.

She said LGBT Youth Scotland’s Trans and Non-Binary and Questioning Coming Out Guide is full of images of young people emerging as colourful butterflies, and says the guide is littered with concerning content….

“Our children are now being told that the categories “man” and “woman” or “boy” and “girl” are outdated conventions rather than scientific facts.

“The big problem is that the ‘evidence’ in these guides is actually ideology, not real evidence drawn from scientific study or a research project. And they simply ignore the growing body of evidence about the lifelong harm transitioning does cause.

It gets worse.

A paediatric staff nurse withdrew her autistic daughter from class after she received inappropriate photos of a man in bed with a child and messages on self-harming from her school LGBT club members.

Now the outraged mum is paying £20,000 a year private school fees after finding every other secondary in East Lothian was signed up to LGBT Youth Scotland’s School Charter Scheme….

Brendan O'Neill in Spiked – The deaths of these hostages shame the Western conscience:

When I saw the photos of the four men and two women killed by their captors in a dank lair in Rafah, I thought to myself: there are people in my community here in the UK who have defaced posters of these people. There are people on my streets who scrawled the word ‘coloniser’ on their faces. There are people in my profession who described the day they were kidnapped as a ‘day of celebration’. There are people in London – and New York, Berlin, Sydney – who expressed solidarity not with these six seized Jews, but with the racists who seized them.

And it made me think: it is not enough today to condemn Hamas. We must also ask how so many in the West came to share in Hamas’s twisted, bigoted hatred for these six human beings. Why so many in the West made excuses for their abduction, vandalised their likenesses and falsely called their persecution ‘resistance’. The barbarism uncovered in Rafah is on Hamas. But the Western conscience is not wholly innocent of this depraved crime….

But this goes beyond foolish ‘left’ apologism for Hamas. It goes beyond excuse-making for terror. There is a case to be made that the self-styled progressive conscience of the West has not been complacent in the face of Hamas’s barbarism, but complicit. Many in the West played an active role in justifying the kidnapping of people like Goldberg-Polin, Lobanov, Gat, Sarusi, Yerushalmi and Danino. They actively bolstered the kidnappers’ claims to be resistance fighters, and they actively prevented the raising of awareness of the kidnap victims, particularly through the destruction of posters featuring their faces. They were more than bystanders to a pogrom – they were unpaid PR men for the pogromists.

He's not wrong.

A letter to the Times today from James Johnson, Chairman of the BMA council from 2003-07:

Sir, As a former chairman of the BMA council I, like so many other members, have been horrified and saddened by the direction taken by the organisation in recent years. The latest idiocy is its peremptory rejection of the Cass review, a position on which it has completely failed to consult the members it purports to represent (“Doctors quit BMA over trans children stance”, news, Aug 27).

At its best, the BMA has been highly effective both in representing the interests of doctors and in promoting better public health and patient care. Examples include its evidence-based campaigns on smoking, seatbelt legislation, medical school expansion and boxing control. Sadly, the BMA has succumbed to entryism, with a group of ideologues now dominating the council. Their views are a world away from those of most doctors, but they seem intent on taking a wrecking ball to the organisation I was proud to serve for many decades.

Creative Scotland is in dire financial straits, but the latest scandal is entirely of its own making. To get the full picture a good start would be with poet Jenny Lindsay's account of her experience at the hands of Scotland's finest literary minds – Anatomy of a Hounding – after she dared to complain about threats of violence openly made against "Terfs" prior to a Pride march. For this she was ostracised and declared persona non grata as a transphobe. It transpired that one of her tormentors, a Dr Alice Tarbuck, was a literature officer with Creative Scotland, who actually called a bookshop and asked them not to stock Lindsay's new book. 

Euan McColm at The Scotsman:

Dr Alice Tarbuck describes herself as a poet in much the same way as I might describe myself as a sprinter if I caught the 66 before it pulled away from the bus stop by the chippy.

By this, I mean I have a rough idea of the mechanics and, from a distance, it might even appear the run isn’t killing me but, look closely, and you’ll see I’m not really a sprinter. And Dr Tarbuck’s not really a poet.

In common with many people who work in the arts sector, Dr Tarbuck is not a serious creative person but a hobbyist, interested in her subject but not, herself, talented enough to practice it to any significantly interesting degree. The little work she has had published lacks rhythm, originality and, crucially, profundity. It’s squiggly nonsense for people who want the physical feeling of reading poetry without the associated complicated emotions.

[You can check out some of the efforts of this latterday William McGonagall here.]

A series of often dumbfounding reports over recent days about the crisis in Creative Scotland included a revelation that shows why the organisation must be closed, immediately.

In June, Lindsay announced the forthcoming publication of her book Hounded, which examines the troubling modern phenomena of women being bullied out of jobs and public life for expressing views about gender and sex that don’t align with voguish opinion.

Five years ago, Lindsay – then one of the country’s leading performance poets – publicly called out a trans-identifying male writer for urging attacks on lesbians at a Pride march. Thanks to the bestupiding effects of trans ideology, Lindsay was swiftly identified among her peers as the villain of this bleak piece. She lost her career, all of her “friends”, and had to move back from Edinburgh to the Ayrshire town where she was raised.

Among those who turned on Lindsay were friends of Tarbuck.

Lindsay stood strong, refusing to compromise in the face of horrific abuse. She defended a precious right her tormentors don’t value at all.

So Lindsay was understandably shocked to discover – after every damned thing – that two days after announcing the publication of her book, Tarbuck had called a bookshop, urging them not to stock it.

Tarbuck, a quango employee whose sole responsibility is the nurturing and support of writers, abused her position to try to harm the career of a writer. Not only that, her behaviour was identical to that of her friends who’d terrorised the same writer back in 2019. One novelist friend asked me whether Tarbuck was stupid or sadistic, to which my reply was that she appears to be both. Perhaps this is the way in which Tarbuck, who (of course) identifies as a witch, contains multitudes.

Ouch.

The scenario I describe would surely merit instant dismissal, wouldn’t you think? How could any writer ever trust her? How can anyone so overcome by a deranged ideology be allowed near any decisions involving public money?

Dr Alice Tarbuck doesn’t love writing. She may like certain writers (she’s very enthusiastic about her friends’ woeful poetry, for example) but she doesn’t even understand what writing is. She sought employment in a field where freedom of speech is first principles stuff and then tried to censor and cancel a writer with whom she personally disagreed.

Naturally, Creative Scotland tried to cover it all up.

The organisation went through a “disciplinary” procedure and allowed Tarbuck to remain in post. Not only that, it was agreed she would not deal with “gender critical” writers to avoid a “conflict of interest”.

That is deranged. Tarbuck is a living, breathing conflict of interest. Not only was she protected, her bosses made life more comfortable for her, removing from her the triggering duty of reading and thinking about things that made her unhappy, and allowing her to stay, a malevolent presence, a schoolyard bully given legitimacy, and then protected, by cowardly and amoral philistines.

The scandals swirling around Creative Scotland are many and bleak. The cumulative effect should be the humiliation of those senior executives who protected their six-figure pay and pension packages, while ignoring their responsibilities to the public purse, and then cut funding for new artists….

Naive artists, writers and musicians have spent much of the past week urging the Government to step in with a financial boost for Creative Scotland. It’s time for them to wise up.

Our national arts quango now exists only to employ those who work for it.

If you’re an artist with hopes for the future, you should be demanding Creative Scotland’s closure, not begging like a fool for it to be given a lifeline.

Update: there's more from Euan McColm on Creative Scotland in the Spectator today.

It was just confirmed that Hamas murdered 6 Israeli and American hostages. They were reportedly executed at short range very recently and their bodies recovered from a terror tunnel in Rafah. Among the murdered were Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Almog Sarusi,… pic.twitter.com/O8O1omHiYJ

— Noa Tishby (@noatishby) September 1, 2024

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It was just confirmed that Hamas murdered 6 Israeli and American hostages. They were reportedly executed at short range very recently and their bodies recovered from a terror tunnel in Rafah. Among the murdered were Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Almog Sarusi, Alex Lobanov, and Ori Danino. For almost a year, Hamas, after barbarically attacking Israel kidnapping children from their beds and party goers from a festival, has held more than 100 hostages in terror tunnels underneath Gaza. At the same time, brainwashed Americans are promoting Hamas’s agenda and calling for a ceasefire. But Hamas is not interested in a ceasefire. Hamas continues to reject ceasefire proposals while torturing and executing innocent people. This needs to end. The pressure must be on Hamas to surrender and release all the hostages. Bring them home NOW. And may Carmel, Eden, Almog, Alex, Ori, and Hersh. Rest in Peace.

Today father-of-two "Valentina" Petrillo will compete in the Paralympics as a woman. Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

This was a dream,” says Valentina Petrillo, who today becomes a Paralympic sprinter at the age of 51, “that I had since I was a little girl.” Except this is an athlete who was never a little girl in the first place. The Italian is a father-of-two who was still competing at 45 as a male, who won national titles in men’s track and field, and whose self-portrayal in 2021 was of a “tough guy who would speak dismissively of women, who would have given you the idea he was sexist”. And yet on Monday morning at the Stade de France, Petrillo will, courtesy of institutional cowardice at every level, line up in the visually-impaired classification of the 400 metres as a woman.

There is no biological ambiguity about Petrillo. Here is a figure who, in a documentary aired this summer, announced to the interviewer: “You can see I’m a man.” Here is somebody who accepts that women are entitled to feel “astonishment, confusion and doubt” about this indefensible state of affairs, acknowledging: “These doubts and questions are legitimate.” But still Petrillo feels entitled to enter the female category for the sake of “happiness”. Quite where the happiness of the women forced out of the Paralympics as a consequence fit into this equation is anybody’s guess.

The residual advantages of Petrillo’s physiological development as male are not difficult to detect. Last year, this former computer scientist won a bronze medal at the World Para-Athletics Championships in Paris in the T12 200 metres, depriving Morocco’s Fatima Ezzahra El-Idrissi of a place on the podium. This was despite Petrillo being 18 years older than anyone else in the field.

A straight comparison of the athlete’s performances in the men’s and women’s categories tells its own story. Petrillo’s results were conspicuously mediocre by the standards of male para-sports, with personal bests of 25.69sec in the 200m in the 58.01 in the 400. That would not even have come close to the minimum male qualifying standard at these Paralympics of 54.00. Through recategorising as a woman, though, everything changes. Running as male, Petrillo won 11 Italian para-athletics titles. As female, the most controversial participant at these Games has won 27 – not to mention eight Masters titles, six Italian Paralympic records, one place in a European final and two global medals. And all when at least two decades beyond a sprinter’s supposed peak….

The consternation has extended to Petrillo’s demand to access female changing facilities. In response to complaints from women’s advocacy group RadFem Italia ahead of a race in Ancona last year, Petrillo was provided with a designated changing room separate from women. The athlete lashed out in a subsequent Facebook post, accusing detractors of being “on the same level as Hitler”.

Which suggests, if it wasn't already obvious, that Petrillo is a monstrous narcissist who cares not a jot for the women he's racing against.

What magnifies women’s anger is the fact that the Petrillo affair at the Paralympics was easily avoidable. Last March, World Athletics acted on multiple scientific studies by restricting international women’s competition exclusively to those born female. But the policy offered by World Para Athletics (WPA) is nothing like so stringent. In reply to questions from Telegraph Sport, a spokesman for the governing body gave no reason for the divergence, claiming that they could not comment on the rules of others.

“Transgender athletes wishing to compete in the female category in WPA competitions are required to declare that their gender identity for sporting purposes is female, and to provide evidence that their total testosterone level in serum has been below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months.” The upper limit of the standard female range is 2.4.

Any future changes, WPA declared, would only be contemplated “after taking into consideration the rights and best interests of all those involved”. But this is a policy that appears predicated purely on the interests of Petrillo. It shows scant regard for the thoughts of Yaqin Shen of China or Venezuela’s Alejandra Perez Lopez, the two athletes drawn in the same Monday morning heat, or to any of the other women who could lose out on a medal because of a warped prioritising of inclusion over fairness. Not even a month after the Olympic boxing eligibility row, sport is about to hurl itself back into a maelstrom of its own making.

Unbelievable but true—Germany now has its own morality police.
A Muslim man in Berlin is chasing down two women for their ‘improper hijab,’ lecturing them on how to dress ‘correctly.’
This isn’t just harassment; it’s a terrifying echo of the Hijab police we’ve battled in Iran… pic.twitter.com/VzezACtNr7

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) September 1, 2024

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Unbelievable but true—Germany now has its own morality police.

A Muslim man in Berlin is chasing down two women for their ‘improper hijab,’ lecturing them on how to dress ‘correctly.’ This isn’t just harassment; it’s a terrifying echo of the Hijab police we’ve battled in Iran and Afghanistan—now taking root in the heart of Europe.

For years, we’ve been silenced, accused of ‘Islamophobia’ when we dare to speak out against the brutality we endure for refusing to cover ourselves ‘properly’ in the name of religion. But silence is complicity. We will not be silent. We will fight against this oppression of women, wherever it rears its ugly head.

This incident isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s the direct result of a foreign policy of appeasement, where the rights and dignity of women are bartered away in the name of diplomacy. But let me be clear: our rights are not up for negotiation. From Tehran to Berlin, to Kabul, leave women alone and try minding your own business for a change.

The Labour governemnt is threatening to backtrack on the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, brought in by the Conservatives. There's certainly an element of the by-now obligatory Tory-bashing in this, whereby everything at every opportunity is blamed on the previous government – it's been branded, ludicrously, as “the Tories’ hate speech charter” – but there may also be a sordid element here of appeasement towards authoritarian countries like China which contribute significantly to university budgets.

Sonia Sodha in today's Observer – Academic free speech is too crucial to be used as a political football by left or right:

Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor at University College London (UCL), has for several years taught a “data detectives” masters module on research methods that teaches students to critically appraise the use of data. One exercise involves discussing a Global Slavery Index finding that China has the second highest prevalence of modern slavery in the world, to help students understand the flawed nature of the data on which it is based.

Last October, one Chinese student complained that the example was a “horrible provocation”. Shipworth was asked by her head of department to remove the example from her course. A few weeks later, she was told complaints had been raised about her “bias” against students from China, based on the fact that two Chinese students had been expelled from the university after she discovered they had been cheating; she was told she could no longer teach her module and she should not post on social media about “educational issues about only one country”. The email expressed concern that if there was perception or misperception of bias, this could threaten the commercial viability of UCL courses.

This is but one case that highlights the fragility of academic freedom and free speech in British universities. This year, an employment tribunal found the Open University had facilitated a “targeted campaign of harassment” against Prof Jo Phoenix in a way that suppressed her academic freedom and amounted to constructive dismissal because of her gender-critical belief that sex is relevant in society. There are other cases of universities unlawfully suppressing gender-critical speech and research.

It takes huge courage to blow the whistle like Shipworth and Phoenix: an alarm bell that something is seriously amiss at a time where there are multiple pressures on academic freedom. These range from authoritarian countries like China putting pressure on students to challenge any criticism while universities are heavily reliant on their fee income, to academics ludicrously intolerant of mainstream beliefs in areas like sex and gender, who see bullying colleagues and management as fair game. The UK has slipped down the rankings of the global Academic Freedom Index in the last decade, now ranking only 66th.

Academic freedom – the freedom of scholars to question existing orthodoxies and put forward new ideas – is fundamental to the pursuit of knowledge and is a building block of democracy. Academic free speech thus attracts robust protection alongside political and journalistic free speech in the European convention on human rights; British universities are legally obliged to protect it under the Human Rights Act and Section 43 of the 1986 Education Act.

But the protection currently provided is not unqualified. [See Akua Reindorf – "What the new legislation does is to give the existing law teeth".]

There is currently no effective way for students and academics to enforce their free speech rights; if these relate to a protected belief, they may be able to pursue an Equality Act claim, as Phoenix did, but this takes years and can cost tens of thousands or more – and is not an option in cases such as Shipworth’s. Rights that are effectively unenforceable are often not worth the paper they’re written on.

Step in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Ushered through by Conservative ministers before the election, this legislation sets out an enforcement mechanism to give teeth to existing free speech law as it applies to universities (and extends free speech duties to student unions). The act has been met with considerable backlash by those who don’t seem to understand that it does not create new legal obligations for universities; it simply makes existing ECHR rights enforceable through a complaints scheme operated by the Office of Students….

There are other signs that Labour might be too quick to frame free speech as one side of a partisan culture war rather than a substantive issue. Last week, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced that she wanted to reverse changes that mean police officers should only record individuals engaging in “non crime hate incidents” if they are motivated by intentional hostility and there is a clear risk of escalation into harm or criminality.

A government source implied that this was somehow Conservative ministers choosing to downgrade the monitoring of racial hatred; in fact, it was an important protection required by the courts that found the police have used “non crime hate incidents” to unlawfully police citizens’ free speech.

Free speech is neither a “nice to have” nor a rightwing project: it is a fundamental tenet of democracy and when it is under threat, it is disempowered minorities who suffer most. Labour needs to stop seeing important free speech protections introduced by Tory ministers as expendable fuel for attacking their predecessors.