Mick Hartley

An interesting piece in the JC from Maia - a woman who emigrated to Israel from California, where she'd convinced herself that she was a man born in the wrong body. Then she had an epiphany. As told to Nicole Lampert:

On October 7, when the sirens started going off in Jerusalem, I was in a panic. It was clear that something was seriously wrong but, also, I knew I wouldn’t have time to get my breast binder on.

Even as I was under this existential threat, I was worried about people realising I was a woman. But I had to run to get to a bomb shelter and I had to put the other fear aside.

And as I ran, for the first time in my adult life I felt my body move naturally. It was at that moment that I realised everything I thought I believed about myself, that I was a man born in the wrong body, one who was waiting to get my breasts removed and to start taking testosterone, and then everything would be normal, was wrong.

Today, as I try to cope with the trauma of losing friends to terrorism, I am also slowly recovering from the trauma of what I did to myself, from the repercussions of binding my breasts for seven years. I realise that I need to speak out, to stop other women like me – butch lesbians – from making the same mistake….

So I went to study in Israel and I really lived my best life there. I already spoke Russian and English, I’d learnt Arabic at school (sponsored by Qatar) and now I was learning Hebrew too. Outside of my studies I got very involved in the peace movement, and was friends with both Jews and Arabs who thought I was as a guy. I earned money as a cleaner and caretaker, wearing a kippah and tzitzit while I worked in strictly Orthodox homes. I became intent on becoming an Israeli citizen. After that, I would start my medical transition.

I did sometimes wonder if I was just a lesbian, but when I tried to join the lesbian scene, I found the only people identifying as lesbians were heterosexual males. All the actual lesbians either called themselves non-binary or were starting medical transitions.

Ha!

What first sowed the seed of doubt was the Israel-Hamas conflict in 2021. Living through that, feeling the ground shake, seeing the rockets fly above my head, was an utterly terrifying experience and because I didn’t want to be stuck without my binder, and my real identity could have been exposed in a shelter, I didn’t shower for 11 days.

Going online I could see that my lefty American friends were justifying what was happening to Israelis, claiming it was for the liberation of Palestine. I understood because I too would have thought like that once –  I too was totally indoctrinated by that culture.  As these were friends of mine from a debating society I thought I just need to discuss it all with them; explain that Hamas was a terrorist group that were hellbent on destroying the Jews but which also made the lives of Palestinians hell. I thought they would assimilate my arguments, after a thorough evaluation within their own logical calculus, and come to a more informed conclusion. Instead, they started slinging insults at me, calling me a coloniser.

That resulted in two things. First, it made me really disillusioned with the Western left. Second, because I’d been looking for material to share on Hamas terrorism, algorithms started sending me material on the “right-wing” side of the culture wars including the gender critical movement. A lot of this content showed me how ridiculous it was to have men in women’s sport and I also started to see videos from detransitioners.

I suppose there's nothing quite like living in a state of fear, under constant threat – away from west coast social contagions – to inject some reality into your life. 

This ideology is so pernicious; you base your entire sense of self on a series of lies.

I realised in that moment that my healthy female body was all I needed to get to a bomb shelter. I realised that I didn’t want to be existing in a state of pathology that could only be remedied with experimental and dangerous medical interventions. Once you start to take testosterone and have your reproductive system removed, you are reliant upon pharmaceutical industries for the rest of your life. While catastrophic, this is somewhat doable if you live in a country that isn’t prone to wars. But if you don’t know whether you will be able to make it to the doctor’s office, it makes no sense at all.

"Doable" is one way of putting it, but it's still catastrophic.

The Robin DiAngelo plagiarism affair is the subject of Hadley Freeman's latest in today's Sunday Times – the anti-racist doyenne caught in her own trap:

A few years ago, not long after the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, I received an email from my now-former bosses in London [that would be the Guardian – MH] reprimanding me for not having signed up for “mandatory unconscious bias and anti-racism workshops”.

This sparked a long correspondence in which they argued that I had to attend to make the office a more welcoming place, and I argued that a welcoming office wouldn’t assume its employees were racist. They asked why I didn’t want to examine my biases; I said unless my biases were affecting my work, they weren’t my employer’s business to examine. I admit it, I was being stubborn. Although I never attended the workshops, so maybe my biases are showing.

I was rereading this correspondence recently. It’s already a fascinating relic of that era, showing how conversations about prejudice suddenly became — and I’m going to use a technical term here, so keep a dictionary handy — insane. And the person largely responsible for this, and for the rise of corporate anti-racism workshops, is Robin DiAngelo.

Last week DiAngelo was accused of plagiarism. To understand why that’s interesting, you need to know that DiAngelo is the most successful anti-racism trainer in the world. Her book White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Race became a blockbuster bestseller in 2020, after Floyd’s murder. She charged up to $20,000 to hold anti-racism workshops at companies like Microsoft and Google, where — in the words of one participant who later gave an interview to the podcast Blocked and Reported — DiAngelo would tell white people that if they had “any reaction to the anti-racism work that isn’t agreement or submission, then that’s proof [they’re racist]”. The “anti-racism work” was little more than white people being told to accept they’re racist.

So denying you’re racist proves you’re racist, according to DiAngelo. It’s the modern-day equivalent of the 17th-century witch trials, an in-office racism ducking stool. Unfortunately, admitting you’re racist also proves you’re a racist. But at least if you fork out $20,000 for an anti-racism course, you show you’re “doing the work”, as DiAngelo put it, like Catholics buying indulgences from the Church. I guess now is a good time to mention that DiAngelo herself is white.

The few writers on liberal publications who suggested DiAngelo’s theories weren’t hugely helpful — to anyone of any race — are black, such as John McWhorter at The Atlantic. White liberal journalists gave her glowing reports. Well, what else could they do? DiAngelo and her ilk had them in a finger trap: if you questioned her, that proved you were racist. Plus there was genuine horror over Floyd’s murder by a police officer. Although quite how a horrific incident in Minnesota could be helped by white people in London confessing to being racist, like evangelicals crying out in church that the devil possessed them, was something I was never clear on. But, of course, it’s easier to lecture employees about micro-aggressions than make any structural changes.

After Floyd’s murder, my local bookshop devoted its front section to books about race, and not the kind I grew up reading, like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Instead they were books with scolding titles like How to Raise An Antiracist, by Ibram X Kendi, “one of the world’s leading anti-racist scholars” (according to his own website), and DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Martin Luther King’s dream of a nation in which children would not be judged by the colour of their skin was very much over: the new race apostles insisted everyone must be judged by their skin, because skin colour is all-defining, and the murder of Floyd proved it.

All this led to a lot of grifters getting a free pass to chide the general public about racism. Only 33 per cent of the money donated to Black Lives Matter in the US between 2020 to 2022 actually went to charitable causes; tens of millions went instead to its co-founder Patrisse Cullors and her family and friends. Kendi’s Centre for Anti-racist Research at Boston University, which he founded in 2020, raised over $55 million in donations. Last year it was announced the centre was downsizing because of poor management by Kendi, and even an extremely sympathetic profile of Kendi in The New York Times in June couldn’t deny that.

Now a complaint has been filed that DiAngelo plagiarised parts of her 2004 doctoral thesis, Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis. With almost inevitable irony, two of the professors she is accused of plagiarising are Asian-American. And for the final cymbal ding, on DiAngelo’s website she writes about the importance of “giv[ing] credit to the work of Bipoc people [black, indigenous and people of colour] who have informed your thinking”.

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative US website, broke the story, and good for it. But this is infuriating to old-school liberals like me, who believe racism is a problem and also believe in critical thinking. DiAngelo was clearly a crackpot, and yet the liberal media showered her with adoration instead of the scrutiny she deserved. Prejudice should not be treated as a partisan issue, but liberals — just as much as conservatives — make it so with stupidity like this. Racism is real, but the anti-racism industry became an absolute racket, which enriched some and improved nothing.

Can we now say goodbye to these race grifters? Alas, I very much doubt it. But it's a start….

Did you know?

The Italian anthem "Bella Ciao," now embraced by Iranian women fighting for freedom, has roots in Jewish folk music.

The melody originally came from Eastern European Jewish traditions before evolving into a symbol of resistance and unity. pic.twitter.com/CLp3gwdqKJ

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) August 31, 2024

I can't resist re-posting this, from November 2022:

Two Iranian sisters sing the old Italian protest song Bella Ciao:

This clip features two videos posted to Instagram by a Persian woman named Samin Bolouri. In the first video, posted on July 12, 2020, Samin and her sister Behin are seen wearing hijabs and singing a Persian version of an Italian protest song titled "Bella Ciao." In the second video, posted on September 16, 2022, Samin and Behin are seen without hijabs singing a different Persian version of the song. This second version of the song is linked to the widespread anti-regime protests that have been taking place in Iran since Jina (Mahsa) Amini died after being beaten and arrested by Iran's morality police for not wearing her hijab properly. In the latter version, the sisters sang: "The cluster of our anger is thirsty for rain. Our rights are not petty… Finally, the chains of oppression will be broken by our hands."

From Wikipedia:

"Bella ciao" ("Goodbye beautiful") is an Italian protest folk song from the late 19th century, originally sung by the mondina workers in protest against the harsh working conditions in the paddy fields of Northern Italy….

Versions of "Bella ciao" continue to be sung worldwide as a hymn of freedom and resistance.

Meanwhile, in Germany:

A podcast episode of Hoss and Hopf had to be deleted by court order because the moderators called a trans-identified man “a man” and used male pronouns to refer to him. The podcasters may be facing potential prison time or a fine of up to €250,000.

In the controversial podcast episode, the hosts discussed the case of Laura Holstein, formerly known as Nicolas. Holstein, a balding male who now identifies as a “woman,” has made multiple headlines over the past few months related to him demanding access to female spaces. Most recently, Holstein, with the support of the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency, has been pursuing legal action against a female-only gym in Bavaria.

But the Frankfurt am Main Regional Court has now stopped in to order the censorship of the Hoss and Hopf episode related to Holstein. The hosts, Kiarash Hossainpour and Philip Hopf, have also been prohibited from referring to Holstein as a man and using male pronouns for him….

In the court’s letter, the hosts were accused of violating Holstein’s “personal rights” by referring to him as male, because he is “legally and socially recognized as a woman.”

Hossainpour explained further: “It is noteworthy that the court saw an ‘extraordinary urgency’ here – as if the use of biologically correct terms represented an immediate danger that could not be postponed. One inevitably wonders whether other, perhaps actually urgent cases had to take a back seat for this.” 

To his audience, Hossainpour posed a question about the impact of gender ideology on observable reality.

“The questions that arise are as explosive as they are uncomfortable: How should a society function in which biological realities and legal fictions come into such a blatant contradiction? What if someone who appears to be clearly male is considered a woman by legal decree and thus gains access to spaces that were traditionally reserved for women?” 

Biological realities and legal fictions in blatant contradiction. Exactly so.

As previously reported by Reduxx, Holstein has a long history of attempting to use his self-declared gender identity to access women’s spaces.

In June the owner of the Ladys First, a female-only gym in Bavaria, denied Holstein membership and permission to enter the women’s locker room. The owner, Doris Lange, cited women’s discomfort with Holstein’s presence, especially as a number of her clients were Muslim women who had religious prohibitions from having intimate parts of their bodies viewed by males.

Following Lange’s refusal, Holstein contacted the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency and the Commissioner for Anti-Discrimination, Ferda Ataman, who demanded Lange pay Holstein €1,000 in compensation. 

Just a few weeks later, Lange received a letter from Holstein’s lawyers demanding an additional €2,500 in damages because he was denied membership in her women’s fitness studio.

According to Emma Magazine, there are 14 gyms in the city of Erlangen where women and men can train together, but Lange’s fitness studio is the only one exclusively reserved for women. This has lead many to speculate that Holstein specifically targeted the female-only space rather than go to a gym where he was welcome.

A male voyeur then, enabled in his activities by legal fictions.

Janice Turner in the Times wonders why LGBT Youth Scotland has been given a free pass for so long:

In 2009 eight men were convicted of running the most depraved child sex ring in Scottish history. Besides sharing the worst categories of dark web paedophile abuse, they fantasised about gaining access to a real child.

One of them, James Rennie, was trusted to babysit his godson, the child of university friends. So, starting when the boy was three months old, Rennie filmed himself sexually abusing the child then shared videos with the other men, even suggesting it would be “hotter” if they came along to join in. Rennie, who was given a life sentence, was the head of LGBT Youth Scotland (LGBTYS), joining the charity in 1997 and becoming chief executive in 2003. Rennie’s trial heard that he often accessed his special sex ring Hotmail account “kplover” (kiddy porn lover) at work.

You’d expect the Scottish Charity Regulator to launch an inquiry to ascertain whether Rennie had access to vulnerable young people, or how being led for years by a predatory paedophile had affected office culture and safeguarding. But it did not. Nor did the police forces that had exposed the sex ring investigate LGBTYS. Both accepted its internal investigation which concluded that everything was fine.

Even more extraordinary, seven months after Rennie was jailed, BBC Children in Need decided to award, for the first time, a grant of £24,000 to LGBTYS. The charity turns down 90 per cent of good causes that apply for funding, yet money raised by BBC viewers was given to a charity whose outgoing chief executive sexually abused a baby.

Seven months after Rennie was jailed. Think about that. But anything LGBT – especially the T – is now ring-fenced as holy and unassailable.

Indeed Children in Need has continued to fund LGBTYS for the last 14 years, with a total of £466,000, until this week, when it abruptly terminated funding. Why? Because this month Andrew Easton, a co-author of the LGBTYS’s 2010 guidance for schools, was convicted of sharing indecent images of children as young as newborns and attempting to groom online what he thought was a 13-year-old boy but was in fact a police officer. For Children in Need this was the final straw.

In 2022 two men said they were groomed at LGBTYS around the time Rennie was chief executive. Sam Cowie, now 28, was 15 and in foster care when he was given cigarettes and alcohol by staff, then taken underage with a fake ID to clubs where he was assaulted and raped by older men. The second claims he was groomed by Rennie and one of his sex ring associates: the culture of the charity, he says, was “like a social network to connect older men with teenagers”. In response, LGBTYS suspended a staff member and has referred itself to the police.

After these revelations, at a tense board meeting in May, Children in Need’s chair of trustees, Rosie Millard, proposed LGBTYS’s funding be suspended, pending an inquiry. But then came Easton’s conviction, with the BBC charity at risk of serious reputational damage. Senior figures argued it should quietly pay the last two tranches of money in LGBTYS’s grant, rather than risk the wrath of activists by publicly defunding it. But Millard prevailed and Children in Need finally cut ties.

Sums it up, really. Continue, rather than "risk the wrath of activists". The institutional cowardice that allows this kind of outrage to continue.

But even before these two recent scandals, LGBTYS raised numerous red flags. Its stated charitable purpose is to work with young people aged over 13, yet its “champions scheme” operates in 40 Scottish primary schools. Its 2017 schools guidance, funded by the Scottish government, stated that a child must be allowed to choose whichever changing room matched their gender identity. A girl upset at undressing with a male should wait until after the “trans young person is done”. Likewise on overnight trips, schools should permit a male pupil to sleep in female dorms, with no need to inform parents. This guidance, after opposition from women’s groups, was removed.

LGBTYS has also campaigned for the prescription of puberty blocking drugs (banned after the Cass review), advised girls online to bind their breasts, referred children to the trans charity Mermaids (which is now under investigation by the English Charity Commission) and demanded schools not inform parents if a child socially transitions. Extreme ideas that few Children in Need fundraisers would support.

Keeping secrets from parents, compromising children’s privacy, discussing sexuality with very young children, swerving official scrutiny even after being led by a child-rapist: LGBT charities have lately been granted a free pass on safeguarding protocols afforded to no other organisations. And many gay men are horrified. They abhor drag queen story hours where men in dresses twerk at toddlers, child drag artists performing in gay bars or little children colouring in Pride flags.

The oldest and gravest homophobic slur, the justification for Section 28, was that gay men can’t be trusted around children. This myth was rightly demolished, yet since then a collective guilt has tipped the scales the other way. Anyone who raises safeguarding concerns about LGBT groups or individuals risks being called a bigot.

Well yes, but it's the T that's surely made the difference. Men with autogynephilia, sexual kinks, flooding into the LGB movement…

Photographer Ashley Suszczynski explores the ancient folkloric traditions still alive in rural communities across Europe. Shown here, masquerade in the north of Spain and in Bulgaria.

Elaborate headdresses and costumes made from wool, animal horns, embroidered fabric, bells, and other ornaments invoke the mystical power to usher in new seasons and scare away evil spirits….

Suszczynski emphasizes that her role, akin to the people she photographs, is that of a storyteller. Through a visual medium, she hopes to share knowledge and understanding of age-old customs to further the preservation efforts of their bearers. “I want to show people how lesser-known cultures, relics, rites, and rituals have withstood time and evolved in our ever-changing world,” she says.

“Harramacho,” Navalacruz, Avila, Spain

“Kukeri,” Village of Opanets, Pleven Municipality, Bulgaria

“Chaushi,” Razlog, Blagoevgrad Province, Bulgaria

“Vazovski Jumal,” Ivan Vazovo Village, Kaloyanovo Municipality, Plovdiv Province, Bulgaria

"Kukeri", Stara Reka village, Tundzha Municipality, Bulgaria

“Kukeri,” Kolarovo Village, Petrich Municipality, Blagoevgrad Province, Bulgaria

“Survakari,” Dolna Sekirna Village, Breznik Municipality, Bulgaria

“Startsi,” Voynyagovo Village, Karlovo Municipality, Plovdiv Province, Bulgaria

“Tranga,” Bielsa, Huesca, Spain

"Survakari", Leskovets Village, Pernik Region, Bulgaria

"Kukeri", Peshtera Village, Zemen Municipality, Pernik Region, Bulgaria
[All images © Ashley Suszczynski]

Click to enlarge.

Nothing to argue with here. Osama Saraya, former editor of Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspape, speaks out about the destruction being wreaked on the Arab world by Iran and its proxies. "We must hold Iran accountable for what it has committed in the Middle East. The Arab countries must declare that by deploying its militias in seven or eight Arab countries, it has seriously influenced their strategic situation…" He's not kidding. Syria, Yemen, Lebanon…they're disaster zones now, largely thanks to Iranian involvement. It's astonishing that this isn't being articulated more forcefully in the Arab world. 

"Religious fundamentalism and militias have destroyed the Arab world, and crushed if from the inside."

A North Korean police chief is demoted for "failing to revolutionize his family":

The Hoeryong police chief was recently demoted and transferred after his daughter was caught watching South Korean dramas, Daily NK has learned.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK on Aug. 26 that the police chief was demoted two ranks in the organizational hierarchy as punishment for his daughter’s crime and was given a lesser assignment as a district chief.

“The provincial police bureau sent a warning to senior officials of law enforcement organizations to ensure that their homes are free of crimes related to reactionary ideology and culture,” the source explained.

“The police chief was demoted not one but two ranks, but he considers himself lucky. He’s praising the Workers’ Party’s mercy for letting him off with an unfavorable reassignment while his own daughter was watching South Korean dramas.”

The police chief’s daughter is a student in her 20s at O Jung-hup Chongjin First Teachers’ College. In late July, she and two friends were caught watching South Korean dramas on a flash drive at their dormitory near the college during a nighttime inspection by a government task force charged with monitoring anti-socialist and non-socialist behavior.

During an interrogation, law enforcement officials determined that the flash drive in question belonged to the daughter of the police chief. 

After being informed of the incident, the provincial police bureau called an emergency meeting of the provincial law enforcement organizations to stress the need for officials to “revolutionize the home” in view of their responsibility to eliminate anti-socialist and non-socialist behavior in society….

According to the source, “In North Korea, if an official is called out for failing to revolutionize his family, it can cause problems for the whole family, including distant relatives. That’s why some people are relieved not to have officials in their families. People generally think that the Hoeryong police chief has received the appropriate punishment for being lax in raising his own children.”

I'd say he was lucky not to be sent to a labour camp.

[W]hile entire families used to be sent to political prison camps for such offenses, this time the only punishment was police chief’s demotion. This indicates that anti-socialist and non-socialist behavior is so pervasive in law enforcement that there is no hope of eliminating it.

In addition to stressing the need to “revolutionize the family,” the provincial police bureau has renewed calls for anyone in possession of “reprehensible capitalist videos” to turn themselves in to the authorities.

The source said the daughter of the Hoeryong police chief was being held for questioning at the Chongjin police station. Since the North Korean government currently calls South Korea its number one enemy, she is likely to be severely punished.

I'm a bit late on this – well, I was away – but it's a goody. Robin Di Angelo, who made her name and her fortune on the idea that all white people are racist – apart from her, presumably – has been accused of plagiarism.

Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author of White Fragility, is a big believer in citing minorities.

In an "accountability" statement on her website, which makes repeated reference to her Ph.D., DiAngelo, 67, tells "fellow white people" that they should "always cite and give credit to the work of BIPOC people who have informed your thinking."

It doesn't matter if their contribution is just a few words. "When you use a phrase or idea you got from a BIPOC person," DiAngelo says, referring to black, indigenous, and other people of color, "credit them."

But the white diversity trainer has not always taken her own advice. According to a complaint filed last week with the University of Washington, where DiAngelo received her Ph.D. in multicultural education, she plagiarized several scholars—including two minorities—in her doctoral thesis.

The 2004 dissertation, "Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis," lifts two paragraphs from an Asian-American professor, Northeastern University's Thomas Nakayama, and his coauthor, Robert Krizek, without proper attribution, omitting quotation marks and in-text citations.

DiAngelo also lifts material from Stacey Lee, an Asian-American professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in which Lee summarizes the work of a third scholar, David Theo Goldberg….

The complaint describes dozens of cases in which DiAngelo, who rakes in almost $1 million a year in speaking fees, passed off the work of others as her own. It calls into question the key credential on which DiAngelo built her career, which has relied on the notion that her therapeutic workshops—which can cost up to $40,000 and insist that all white people are racist—are backed by scholarly expertise.

"No one who respected the basic expectations of scholarship would do this," said Steve McGuire, a member of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and former professor of political theory at Villanova University. "The amount of copying of verbatim language without quotation marks or clear and consistent citations in these examples is appalling."…

Once an obscure professor at Westfield State University, DiAngelo emerged in 2020 as the high priestess of progressive racialism. Her most famous book, White Fragility, published in 2018, flew off the shelves following George Floyd's death, beating out How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi—a black man—on USA Today's best-seller list.

DiAngelo has become a staple of teacher trainings, corporate affinity groups, fundraisers, and "antiracist" book clubs. She even addressed 184 members of Congress, including then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), about what it "mean[s] to be white," telling the Democratic caucus in 2020 that its members would continue to "hurt" black people until they reckoned with the question.

The talk was one of myriad speaking engagements that launched DiAngelo into the top 1 percent of American earners and helped her afford three houses worth $1.6 million. At one of those houses, a cabin in rural Washington State, DiAngelo has been photographed relaxing with a group of friends who, by all outward appearances, are exclusively white.

It's such an American story: selling guilt to white liberals. There's an inbuilt problem that affects us all, apparently, which only her teachings can resolve – at some considerable expense. Freud laid the groundwork, and the unscrupulous have been cashing in ever since.

John Vachon, March 1943. "John Phillips enroute to Mobile, Alabama, on U.S. Highway 29 near Greenville, Alabama."

[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]