Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Intermission

    Off for a few days. Back Wed. 28th.

  • In Union Park

    The anti-Israel demo at the Democratic Convention in Chicago reaches its logical conclusion:

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  • Mere reproductive functions

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  • A ‘highly respected imam’

    A glimpse into our happy future, when "Islamophobia" has been criminalised? Hannah Baldock at Spiked:

    There appears to be no bounds to the ‘useful idiocy’ of the BBC when it comes to enemies of liberty.

    At the weekend, BBC Radio London presenter Asad Ahmad sought the counsel of Haitham al-Haddad, the chair of the Muslim Research and Development Foundation (MRDF), over the race riots which had just erupted across England. Haddad, if you are blissfully unaware, is a stalwart of the Islamist far right.

    Not that listeners would know this from Ahmad’s introduction. He referred to the Saudi-trained cleric as a ‘highly respected imam’. ‘Highly respected’ by whom exactly? Certainly not by anyone who supports secularism, democracy or human rights. After all, Haddad is a proponent of the regressive ideology of caliphism. He thinks that the UK is an ungodly society and should be replaced by an Islamic state with a system of Sharia governance.

    These views, drawn from fundamentalist Deobandi and Salafi doctrines, used to be a far-right fringe position among Muslim migrants in Britain. But thanks to financial support from Saudi Arabia and regional rivals Qatar and Iran, caliphism has gained broader purchase in the UK in recent decades. As Ed Husain notes in his 2021 book, Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain, ‘caliphism is anti-Western and seeks to subvert British culture, law and institutions from within’ and it’s being ‘embedded in speeches, sermons, books, websites and charities’.

    Evangelising Hate, a 2014 report from the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, provides an eye-opening portrait of the misogyny, intolerance and authoritarianism of Haddad and his ilk. According to the report, he thinks ‘a man should not be questioned’ by the authorities if he is found to have assaulted his wife because ‘they can sort out their matters among themselves’. A 2018 investigation by The Times quoted him as saying that women from Western countries who had committed adultery were ‘begging’ him to take them to an Islamic country in order to be stoned to death.

    What’s more, according to Evangelising Hate, Haddad ‘believes that criticising suicide bombing is wrong because to do so would be to “nullify” “defensive jihad”’. He says it is a duty of Muslims to engage in jihad and ‘fight everyone until they establish the law of Allah’. On the day of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom in Israel, he posted on Facebook a prayer for Allah to grant victory to ‘the people of truth in Gaza’ against ‘their oppressors’….

    It’s perplexing, isn’t it? It would be one thing for the BBC to invite Haddad on air to challenge his views. It is quite another to present him as a ‘highly respected imam’, supposedly the ideal man to calm things down after days of violent rioting. The presenter even asked him, ‘What is your advice to the media, what is your advice to politicians, what should they do?’.

    The riots show how society can violently fracture if communities lose trust in each other. Yet how can we rebuild that trust, that social cohesion, when the myopic BBC chooses to treat bigots like Haddad as fonts of wisdom?

    Perhaps "Islamophobic" articles like this will, soon enough, no longer be permissible.

  • Like Winston Smith in 1984

    Today is International Apostasy Day. At the National Secular Society, Dr Ben Jones reflects on his recent research into "the experiences of ex-Muslims and their increasingly precarious position in Britain":

    That former Muslims face persecution across the world, including in Britain, will not be news to anyone who has followed the work of the National Secular Society or the Council of ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB), or read the books of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But the extent of the persecution they face in Britain is poorly understood, as is the extent of apostasy from Islam: I lost count of the number of times I explained what my research was about, to a reaction of incredulity than anybody left, or was able to leave, Islam.

    Yet research suggests that as many as 7% of children raised in the United Kingdom as Muslims will leave the religion by adulthood. This is a small figure compared with other religions, which shed followers at devastating rates: Islam and atheism are uniquely successful at transmitting belief and values from parent to child. But that 7% is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of former Muslims living in Britain today.

    Perhaps the threats against prospective apostates has some bearing on that low 7% figure. Just a thought.

    Of that number, some have become high profile public activists, some for secular atheism like the CEMB, or for Christianity. The latter include street preacher Hatun Tash, who was lucky to escape with her life after a knife attack and a separate plot to buy a gun to murder her. In in a dark irony, her would-be assassin Edward Little was a convert to Islam….

    Farah, also 19, compared her situation as a secret apostate to that of Winston Smith in 1984: "I live in a very Muslim area and it's impossible to detect other ex-Muslims since you can't just go up to people and ask them if they're ex-Muslim.

    The process of finding other apostates in real life parallels 1984. It's like when Winston observes other characters looking for signs of 'unorthodoxy' that would prove that they're against the party. Maybe, that hijabi who is too passionate about women's rights is an apostate or that guy who attends every Friday prayer, you don't really know."

    And the consequences of getting it wrong, and outing yourself to the wrong person, could be disastrous.

    The latest challenge for apostate Muslims to face: the threat of new "Islamophobia" laws. 

    But by far the most dangerous threat on the horizon for ex-Muslims (and many other people besides) is the definition of 'Islamophobia' being advanced by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims. This definition, among other things, brands as Islamophobic anyone who makes "mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Muslims".

    How does that leave the ex-Muslim who draws a link between the treatment they suffered and the treatment suffered by tens of thousands of others? Would drawing an adverse inference about the entire religion from this overwhelming data be branded as Islamophobic on the basis of stereotyping? If translated into law, as seems possible under a new government, ex-Muslims' strident criticisms of Islam and elements of the Muslim communities they grew up in could well be criminalised as hate crimes.

    The definition would also prohibit "claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword". Which again, if translated into law, could easily criminalise Iranian dissidents who celebrate and mourn pre-Islamic Persia, or mainstream historians like Tom Holland who have written about the early Islamic conquests and the wars of Muhammad's followers against the Eastern Roman Empire. Indeed, the definition is so inimical to freedom of speech that it has united no two more disparate figures in opposition than one of religion's staunchest critics, Richard Dawkins, and Tim Dieppe of Christian Concern.

    Ex-Muslims are in the unenviable position of being canaries in the coal mine for the rest of us: if ex-Muslims cannot speak freely then none of us can. If they cannot criticise or satirise religion, nobody else is safe to. Their warnings should be heeded most urgently.

  • Burning the devil’s instruments

    The Taliban latest, from the Telegraph:

    The Taliban has sacked hundreds of men from Afghanistan’s security forces because they are unable to grow beards.

    Thousands of musical instruments had also been destroyed by the militant group in the past year, the notorious ministry for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice said in its annual update.

    Mohibullah Mokhlis, the director of planning and legislation at the ministry, told a press conference in Kabul that “281 beardless officers were identified, confirmed and dismissed” from the country’s security services in the past 12 months.

    “The hairstyles of 450 military mujahideen were corrected to comply with Sharia law,” he added. “And some who repeated the [hairstyle] violation were sent to military courts.”

    The Taliban has prohibited barbers in several provinces from shaving or trimming beards, claiming that the edict aligns with Sharia law.

    It is mandatory for Muslim men to have a beard that is at least the “length of a fist”, according to Islamic law, which is strictly upheld by the Taliban….

    Separately, the Taliban’s regime disclosed that 21,328 musical instruments had been destroyed in the past year.

    Jalil Ahmad, a former guitar teacher in the western city of Herat, recounted how morality forces had stormed his home earlier this year and beaten him for owning several musical instruments.

    “They knocked on the door, and I saw them through the window. I told my family not to open it, but one of them climbed over the gate and jumped into the yard. He unlocked the door and five more officers stormed into the house,” he said.

    The police ransacked his house and discovered five guitars and several other instruments.

    The 31-year-old was then taken to a police station, where he said he had been severely beaten.

    “They were saying, ‘The foreigners are gone and you cannot live with the devil’s instruments any more,’” he said.

  • The mastectomy social contagion

    Looking at the explosion in mastectomies for young teens in the US, from the perspective of a woman with breast cancer. Dana Kennedy in the NY Post:

    When Amy Sousa was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer in April, she went into “icy cold panic” about whether doctors could shrink the 10-centimeter tumor in her right breast — or if she would need a mastectomy.

    It’s a tragic, and ironic, place to be in for an activist who has spent the past five years warning young women about the “contagion” of transgender ideology and the celebratory trendiness of top surgery — having your breasts removed as part of gender-affirming care — on social media.

    “Radical double mastectomies on girls are not a product of their so called ‘mental illness,’ they’re a product of social indoctrination,” Sousa, who holds a master’s degree in psychology, told The Post from her home in Port Townsend, Wash.

    “Kids are being disassociated from the realities of life and are being indoctrinated by publicity and marketing to think that surgery and lifelong drugs will make them happy.

    “They’re being manipulated to turn something normally viewed as painful and serious to associate it instead with something to envy and with celebrity status.”

    Now she’s using the pain and fear triggered by trying to save her cancerous breast from amputation to shine even more of a light on what she sees as sharp rise in the glamorization and marketing of top srugery for biological females who don’t identify as women or are transitioning to men….

    Young people ages 13 to 17 are the biggest group that identify as transgender in the US — around 1.4% of the age group, or about 300,000 of them, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA.

    The overall number of Americans undergoing gender-affirming surgery is on the rise, research in 2023 revealed, almost tripling between 2016 and 2019 alone.

    Between 2018 and 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to data analysis based on insurance claims. This tally does not include procedures paid for out-of-pocket.

    The sex reassignment surgery market was over $733 million in 2023 and is projected to surpass $2 billion by 2032, according to the Global Market Insights research firm.

    There's money to be made here, and plenty of it. And yes, we meet again those ghouls cashing in, like Siobhan Gallagher – “Dr. Teetus Deletus”. 

    Gallagher, who is originally from Ireland, has said she does more than 500 gender-affirmation surgeries a year, some of them to teens under 18.

    She was reported to the Federal Trade Commission in 2022 for using her enormous social media platforms “to appeal to hundreds of thousands of underage social media users, advertise Gallagher’s ‘gender affirming’ plastic surgery services, and sell them to a vulnerable and impressionable population of children and youth experiencing distress with their gender identity and developing bodies.”

    “Just realized I only get to yeet 4 teets next week,” Gallagher posted to Instagram atop a selfie of her looking sad….

    And it’s not just Gallagher. Instagram and TikTok are replete with videos of “Yeet the Teet” parties commemorating voluntary mastectomies, as well as users who post photos of their bandaged chests and talk about still being drugged up on morphine.

    “Ya (trans) boy is getting top surgery tomorrow! Time to yeet those teets,” wrote one poster on Reddit as commenters cheered.

    “Chesticles to da recepticles! wrote one….

    “If you go on GoFundMe right now, there are so many girls trying to get their top surgery,” Sousa said. “It’s incredibly disturbing. These girls are mimicking each other. They’re following each other. And they’re creating this as a trend. I see this as a social contagion.

    “They’re in the hospital after these radical double amputations, smiling and posting pictures while they’re showing their followers their chests that are still leaking blood,” Sousa added. “But if you go to a cancer site and look at the women who have gotten a double mastectomy because of cancer, you’ll see a much different look on their faces. They’re talking about how hard the recovery is and how they can’t lift anything and how much pain they’re in.”

  • A lot of empty green space

    That Democratic National Convention protest maybe isn't quite the seismic event we'd been promised. Michael Powell at The Atlantic – The pro-Palestinian “Crashing the Party” event was to the protests of Chicago 1968 what a scouting squad is to an army.

    On top of the stairs of Chicago’s elevated Green Line yesterday, I had a fine view of the 13-acre Union Park. I squinted, looking for the promised cauldron of Democratic National Convention protesters, the tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian “Crashing the Party” masses ready to rumble at what was billed by the Democratic Socialists of America on social media as the “event of the season.”

    I spotted a clump of protesters around a soundstage. I saw a line snaking toward the porta-potties, and, under distant oak trees, I could see four dozen cops chatting with one another, bicycles at their side. I saw great piles of protest signs upbraiding genocide joe Biden waiting to be picked up by as-yet-unseen protesters. I saw a lot of empty green space….

  • Bland platitudes about citizenship, regurgitated myths about personality types, indoctrination in postmodern politics

    John Armstrong at the Critic on efforts to incorporate "social justice" in higher education – Teaching is in danger of degenerating into indoctrination:

    Over recent years the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) has updated their curriculum guidance in all subject areas to include themes of social justice. They have done this by requiring that all courses include elements of Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).

    As a result, economics departments are told they should “adopt a zero-tolerance approach to everyday micro-aggressions”. Business and Management courses are instructed to take advantage of “opportunities to involve students as co-creators of the curriculum to ensure the use of inclusive language.”  Mathematicians are advised that “Values of EDI (Equality Diversity and Inclusion) should permeate the curriculum and every aspect of the learning experience to ensure the diverse nature of society in all its forms is evident.”

    One might well question how to incorporate the values of EDI into a course on abstract algebra or functional analysis. We are told it should be done by teaching that “some early ideas in statistics were motivated by their proposers’ support for eugenics, some astronomical data were collected on plantations by enslaved people, and, historically, some mathematicians have recorded racist or fascist views or connections to groups such as the Nazis.” Similarly, bioscientists should acknowledge “that influential scientists might have benefited from and perpetuated misogyny, racism, homophobia, ableism and other prejudices”. Likewise, “Engineering curricula should foster global perspectives and facilitate the recognition of historic western assumptions”.

    Oh god. We don't have to import every American fad over here, do we?

    All is not going well, however. Students appear to be smarter than the QAA bureaucrats.

    Fortunately, there is now a case-study one can consider to evaluate the effectiveness of the QAA’s recommendations. The module “Gateway to King’s” was piloted at King’s College London and was designed to introduce all first-year students at King’s to topics which map closely to the QAA’s required themes. The plan was to roll the module out as a compulsory module for all first-year students. However, the module was canned after the pilot. 1657 students were eligible to take the course, 366 enrolled and 42 completed it. I describe the contents of the course in this paper so you can decide for yourself which of the risks I have identified were realised.

    I believe the reason the course failed is that the QAA’s recommendations are fundamentally flawed. University students want to be taught high quality content by renowned experts. They do not want bland platitudes about citizenship, regurgitated myths about personality types, or indoctrination in postmodern politics. Nor do students want to pay the opportunity costs of pursuing someone else’s hobby horse. Maths students wish to study maths, music students music, and politics students want to study politics. All students want to learn how to think, not what to think.

    Academics should not allow quangos to determine what we teach. Instead, we should pursue academically led curriculum development, guided by the individual research expertise of academics. This is the route to high quality Higher Education.

  • At the March on the DNC

    On the other hand…Speakers at the March on the DNC in Chicago:

    At the August 19, 2024 "March on the DNC" pro-Palestine rally in Chicago, Nesreen Hasan of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) said: “We will end Zionism!” Hatem Abudayyeh, spokesman of the March on the DNC referred to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris as "Killer Kamala," to U.S. President Joe Biden as "Genocide Joe," and to U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken as "Baby-Killer Blinken." Activists with the Palestinian Feminist Collective said that the Democratic Party may be blue, but that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s hands are red with the blood of innocent Palestinian children. Another activist said: “We will resist by any means necessary.” Pro-North Korea activist Ju-Hyun Park of Nodutol for Korean Community Development said that the U.S. and South Korea are rehearsing for the invasion of North Korea, and Anees Aqel of Palestine Solidarity in Grand Rapids, MI praised the Palestinian “resistance fighters.” Omar Flores of the Coalition for the March on the RNC in Milwaukee also said: “Democrats cannot defeat the Republicans without defeating the genocide first… We are going to force them!” Protesters at the rally held signs issued by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) bearing the text: “Victory to the Palestinian Resistance!”

    Note also the familiar chants about queer rights and trans rights being under attack (and that LGBTQIA+ sign). The level of mass delusion is off the charts. 

    That pro-North Korean activist Ju-Hyun Park adds the final touch to the general insanity. For more on him see here:

    "There is a reason the Nakba and the division of Korea began at the same time, backed by the same interests. There is a reason that while South Korean corporations copied from Zionism, North Korea has spent decades arming and training the Palestinian resistance. "

    and here:

    "the DPRK has never once recognized the Zionist tumor that goes by the name of Israel."