Mick Hartley

A powerful critique of the Iranian regime from Islamic scholar Mohammad-Taghi Akbarnejad.

Iranian Islamic scholar Mohammad-Taghi Akbarnejad said in an interview posted on Azad TV on YouTube (Iran) August 10, 2024 that the Iranian regime is not fulfilling the goals and promises of the Islamic Revolution. He said that Iran has lost without firing a single bullet by losing its people. Akbarnejad said that Iran has taken an entire people hostage for the sake of religion. He added that the regime tells the people that they will remain hostages so long as America exists. Akbarnejad stated that the public in Iran feels that it has been taken hostage by Palestine, and therefore most Iranians were not saddened by the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

I wonder if he's voicing widely spread concerns from figures inside the higher echelons of the regime, or if he's just speaking for himself.

The man on the sofa facing the camera doesn't look at all happy – but our scholar here is eloquent, intelligent, and persuasive. 45 years in power, and our leaders have turned themselves into idols, while none of the promises of the revolution have been fulfilled. "The chance you had is over. Today is the day that the Islamic Republic must be held accountable to the public."

A welcome sign.

A trans paedophile gets sent to a woman's prison. From Reduxx:

A transgender pedophile in Illinois is being housed in a women’s prison after being found guilty on multiple counts related to the sexual assault of his two children. Michelle Blessent, born James, is being held at the Logan Correctional Facility in Lincoln, Illinois.

As previously reported by Reduxx, Blessent, 35, was initially arrested in April of 2023 in a file which included five counts of predatory criminal sexual assault of a victim under 13.

But on November 15 of that year, three more charges were applied, including one additional count of predatory criminal sexual assault of a victim under 13, one count of grooming, and one count of exploitation of a child. In a public notice posted to their official Facebook, the Bloomington Police Department confirmed that the new charges were related to the original victim. During the course of the trial, a second young victim under the age of the 13 was named. Both of the victims are reported to be Blessent’s biological children – a boy and a girl.

At the time of his original arrest in April, a public information officer with the Department admitted that they were treating the arrest as that of a woman because of Blessent’s “gender identity.” …

Following the initial release of Blessent’s mugshot, many members of the community expressed confusion because the police had described Blessent as “female.” On Facebook, many took to the Bloomington Police Department’s comments to note that Blessent was male, and that describing him as a “woman” was inaccurate. 

As a result, some trans activists defended Blessent in the comments, condemning the Bloomington Police Department for not censoring “transphobic” remarks on their press release….

Despite legally being male, and having an accurate sex marker in the Illinois Offender Directory, Blessent has been sent to the Logan Correctional Center for Women in Lincoln.

But Blessent is not the only trans-identified male who has been sent to Logan.

In 2019, the Illinois Department of Corrections approved the transfer of a transgender inmate from an all-male prison to a women’s prison after he claimed he’d been the victim of sexual harassment and abuse. Janiah Monroe, born Andre Patterson, had successfully obtained transfer with the assistance of various trans activists and law firms, while claiming he had been struggling with PTSD from his initial placement in a men’s prison.

Monroe, who had convictions on several felonies including second-degree murder, was later accused of raping a female inmate at Logan, sexually harassing female inmates, and threatening staff members.

Though the IDOC attempted to move him back to the men’s estate, Governor Pritzker’s office overruled the decision and allowed him to remain at the women’s prison. Pritzker is known for being an ardent supporter of trans activism, and is the brother of Jennifer Pritzker, a trans-identified male billionaire who frequently funds trans causes.

See here for more on Jennifer Pritzker.

"Taliban sentence woman to stone in Balkh"

"The primary court of the Taliban in Shulgarh district, Balkh province, has issued a sentence of stoning to death of a woman on the charge of extramarital affair."

(retweet of article in Persian, Google translation in screenshots) https://t.co/0Npn8T4Y2R pic.twitter.com/je9G557VnD

— Lily Maynard (@LilyLilyMaynard) August 18, 2024

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Do men who commit adultery get stoned? I think we know the answer to that one.

John Vachon, March 1943. "Charlotte, North Carolina (vicinity). Filling station on a highway out of town."

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

Gaza protestors, we learn, are descending on Chicago for the Democratic Convention next week. Many on the left seem to view this as a reasonable response to the Democrats' support for Israel, and in the noble tradition of left-wing protests against establishment policies. The gold standard here, I suppose, would be the 1968 protests against the war in Vietnam at the Democratic Convention – again in Chicago – which has gone down in left-wing folklore. That was a notably violent affair, characterised by the brutality of Mayor Daley's police department set against the likes of the Yippies under Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. 

But, as Jonathan Chait points out, this is very different:

The Chicago protests are being led by Hatem Abudayyeh, the national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. On October 7, Abudayyeh made an official statement for USPCN celebrating the slaughter of Israeli civilians: “Palestinians have an internationally-recognized right to resist illegal military occupation, and today’s attacks from the Palestinian Resistance should be understood as a legitimate response to unending violence from Israel’s extreme right-wing, racist, white supremacist, zionist government and settler movement … now we have no choice but to defend ourselves, because the Israeli military and racist settlers have been attacking and killing with impunity, and must and will be stopped! We will win our liberation and Return!”

And while this rhetoric may be shocking, every major anti-Israel activist group has adopted a similar position. Students for Justice in Palestine called the October 7 attacks “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” against “the façade of an impenetrable settler colony.” The Palestinian Youth Movement saluted “the active decolonization of Palestinian land” and stated “We have a right to resist on our own land.” Within Our Lifetime declared, “Zionism is a settler-colonial white supremacist ideology built on the genocide and dispossession of the Palestinian people,” and therefore, “We defend the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.” Jewish Voices for Peace declined to condemn the attack, instead blaming it on Israel: “The bloodshed of today and the past 75 years traces back directly to U.S. complicity in the oppression and horror caused by Israel’s military occupation.”

The common thread running through these statements, other than unbounded eagerness to shed Israeli blood, is a worldview suggested by the recurring terms settler and colonist. All these groups adhere to a left-wing western doctrine that is the subject of an excellent new book, On Settler Colonialism, by Adam Kirsch….

Settler-colonialism theorists believe certain people have an authentic, permanent relationship to the land. Their rhetoric, as Kirsch points out, echoes the romantic nationalism of the old German right. “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinians ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land,” writes Jamal Nabulsi of University of Queensland. Palestinians have “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land,” in the words of the scholar Steven Salaita.

Compare this with the blood-and-soil nationalism of Nazi ideologists such as Richard Walther Darre — “The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it … Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it” — and you will have difficulty detecting any difference. Indeed, if you switched Palestinian with German, it would be hard to tell one theorist from the other.

An important corollary of settler-colonialist thought is that, because they lack a naturalistic connection to any soil, the Jews must be rendered a permanently rootless subaltern class. This has an echo of the Nazi conception of the Jew as alien, and at times its rhetoric has the same overtones. Salaita, again, on the Zionists: “In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity … There is no real notion of the commons in Zionism. Public space is deeply personal, demarcated and apportioned based on a crude obsession with genetics … Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic.” This is blood-and-soil nationalism for the left.

The irony is of course that the Jews have a deeper and longer connection to the land of Israel than the Palestinian Arabs. And, in the background, unacknowledged here and unacknowledged by the protestors, are the claims of Islamic and Arabic imperialism – which can never accept a Jewish state on the land decreed to them by Allah.

And let's not talk about Arab "settler-colonialism" across north Africa. Or the current and continuing genocide of black Africans in Sudan….

More on Arezoo Badri – previously here and here – from Iran International:

The family of Arezou Badri, a 31-year-old woman shot by Iran’s police on July 22 for allegedly violating mandatory hijab laws, is under intense government pressure to withdraw their complaint.

Badri, a mother of two, was left paralyzed after the shooting, an incident that has ignited outrage both within Iran and on the international stage.

The family's complaint regarding Badri, who suffered severe spinal cord injuries and remains hospitalized at Valiasr Hospital in Tehran, was heard in a court this week. However, the family remains dissatisfied with the outcome and the judicial process.

Iran International has learned that she underwent another surgery on Wednesday to remove fluid accumulated in her lungs, and her condition remains critical.

According to our sources, the Badri family members have been summoned by intelligence and security agencies, pressured to stay silent, and urged to withdraw their complaint.

Sources revealed that the family, including Badri's sister, is under intense pressure from security agencies to deliver a coerced confession on camera regarding Badri's situation.

The attack on Badri took place when she was stopped at a police checkpoint while returning home with her sister after work in Noor, Mazandaran province.

According to reports and images obtained by Iran International, the police opened fire after stopping the car on a dirt road, striking Badri in the back.

A warrant for the confiscation of Badri's vehicle over an earlier alleged hijab violation led police to open fire from the rear driver's side. Sources told Iran International that Badri was initially taken to a hospital in Noor before being transferred to Imam Khomeini Hospital in Sari. Since then, her family has faced intense pressure from security forces to stay silent about the shooting and her condition….

Prominent Iranian activist and journalist Masih Alinejad denounced the attack on Badri, writing on X that "the morality police shot this woman and paralyzed her over a hijab." Alinejad stressed that "regardless of who is president" in Iran, women continue to suffer for simply showing their hair, urging others to "be her voice."

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz also weighed in, describing the attack on Badri as a reflection of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s “murderous dictatorship,” which he said oppresses citizens and enforces “radical Islam.”

He's not wrong – though, unlike protests against Israel, the streets of London are unlikely any time soon to see protests against Iran, or their Hamas proxies.

The incident is reminiscent of previous cases, such as that of Armita Geravand, a 16-year-old who was injured and went into a coma after being attacked by hijab enforcement officers at Tehran's Shohada Metro Station on October 1 of last year. She died on October 27 after 28 days in Fajr Military Hospital.

Similarly, in September 2022, Mahsa Zhina Amini, a 22-year-old woman, fell into a coma after being arrested by Iran’s morality police. Amini was reported dead on September 16 at Kasra Hospital which sparked nationwide protests, leading to the "Woman, Life, Freedom" uprising.

There've been a few like this already. London imam claims ‘Zionists’ were behind far-right riots:

An imam at a London mosque led by an extremist preacher has claimed that Zionists were behind the recent hard-right riots.

Ashraf Dabous, of the Lewisham Islamic Centre, said that riot participants were being “manipulated and misguided” so that supporters of the state of Israel could cast aspersions on Muslims.

Similar claims have been made since by Press TV, Iran’s state-funded channel, which reported on the hard-right agitators’ “multiple connections to the Zionist entity”.

Dabous has been deputy imam at Lewisham since 2017. The mosque attracted controversy a year earlier when its head imam, Shakeel Begg, was found by a High Court judge to have espoused extremist positions and “encouraged religious violence”….

He told the congregation that the rioters were prejudiced but had also been misled and manipulated by “individuals who do not have their best interests at heart”.

He went on: “It’s quite well known now publicly, due to information that has been released online, that their manipulators are Zionists and they are supporters of the state of Israel.

“With ground that has been lost over the past few months, something had to take place that would try to win some ground back for the Zionist agenda. What a better way than to paint the Muslims being savages and killers and barbaric, which in reality is a projection of the Zionist state itself.”

Reverse Zionist and Muslim here and you'd be nearer the truth.

Another tale on gender woo, and its grip on the arts world. This time it's bookselling and publishing – but there's a twist. Nina Welsch at The Critic:

Sound the klaxon, another woman has lost her job thanks to the gender wars. But in a major twist, the casualty this time was not someone from the gender-critical camp. Tilly Fitzgerald, an influencer and senior bookseller at Waterstones, was sacked by the bookshop because of a vicious tweet she directed at the bestselling author Christina Dalcher.

Dalcher had, in civil terms, defended SEEN In Publishing (a new network for those in the publishing world who “recognise the material reality of sex, and support freedom of expression”) against one of many hostile reactions from other publishing figures. Fitzgerald weighed in, assuring Dalcher: “Ooh, I’ll enjoy tearing up your books and popping them in the bin today. Thanks for the heads up.”

In response, Dalcher quoted Fitzgerald’s tweet to highlight the Fahrenheit 451 approach that such bookselling bloggers take towards those in publishing who refuse to conform to gender woo-woo. Fitzgerald’s account was her professional one as well as personal, and Waterstones parted company with her.

This has come as a welcome surprise for many women (and men) scarred by mistreatment and ostracism by gender identitarians in their professional life — especially the arts where connections and reputation are everything.

Simultaneously, it has come as a horrible shock for radical progressives and their #BeKind allies, who’ve never previously had to entertain the idea that they might face consequences for their political opinions bringing their workplace into disrepute.

Amongst gender ideology’s dissidents, there is some forgivable schadenfreude as well as disgust at the hypocrisy of those amongst Fitzgerald’s defenders, who have suddenly developed an interest in freedom of speech in publishing.

More than 500 authors and publishing employees have signed an open letter urging Waterstones to reinstate Fitzgerald. One of the more famous signatories is Chocolat author Joanne Harris, who, whilst head of the Society of Authors, was content to let crickets chirp whilst women in her industry were hounded, slandered and discriminated against….

Publishing is one of the worst sectors for political conformism and related bullying, which cannot be separated from the fact that it is one of the most hyper-feminised industries, dominated by women at all levels including the top. Glass ceiling victories aside, there is something about the feigned egalitarianism of female competitiveness that translates depressingly well to modern publishing culture.

The key to successful sabotage and status-gain is, as any wily mean girl knows, covertness. Agents and publishers are snowed under with proposals and pitches. It’s a cut-throat, jealous and business-led world that operates behind a facade of hope, creativity and reward for perseverance. Which is why publishing was fated to become enmeshed in the DEI paradox, where diversity, equity and inclusion are pursued through conformity, discrimination and exclusion.

All those awfully nice people keeping a tight grip on the type of awfully nice person that can be allowed in to their lovely creative inclusive little world.

Jonny Best is a silent film pianist. A few years back he signed a letter in support of JK Rowling….

I had been accompanying silent films at the BFI Southbank cinemas for a year or so when the Rowling support letter was published. A day or two later, I saw there’d been a few tweets to the BFI mentioning me and demanding to know why a “transphobe” was working on the Southbank. I didn’t think too much of it, and I was looking forward to my next BFI show — the great MGM silent, The Wind, starring Lillian Gish. Covid put paid to that and, like many musicians, I was out of work for the best part of two years.

When BFI Southbank reopened, something had changed. Emails enquiring about work went unanswered. As I persisted, excuses started arriving — my emails had gone into the security vault. The cinemas are being renovated. Maybe next year? My contacts at the BFI are nice people, so I believed them. Over the next couple of years, as I saw every other pianist get gigs, it dawned on me that I probably wasn’t going to get booked again.

Suspecting you’ve been blacklisted is one thing; knowing for certain is another. Figuring it out involves piecing together fragments.

A few days after Rowling published her essay, the chief executive of the BFI, Ben Roberts, and the BFI festivals director, Tricia Tuttle, tweeted what they called “a note to our trans and non-binary friends”. They did not mention Rowling, but their meaning could not have been clearer:

Trans and non-binary members of our BFI communities … have come under renewed attack in this last week … with major cultural figures continuing to share thoroughly discredited anti-trans rhetoric as pseudo-concerns about the welfare of children and of cisgender women.

The tweet was deleted a few days later.

As I began to suspect I’d been blacklisted, I remembered the two-year-old tweet and re-read it. It epitomises the extreme identity politics that is suffocating the arts today with its performative kindness towards its preferred, sanctified minorities and the ruthless dispatching of dissenters. Here are two senior leaders at the BFI — a public institution — behaving with unconscionable cruelty towards Rowling, whilst publicly signalling their affinity with this political movement….

When an organisation becomes captured by this kind of politics, blacklisting is just one of the ways in which the political monoculture is protected. Dissenting employees who are already on the inside are coerced into silence, whilst those with approved politics can speak freely, happily bringing their politics into the workplace. This dynamic is widely reported by staff inside cultural organisations.

Those who are not silent risk punishment, either internally through the weaponisation of complaint and disciplinary procedures, or externally by the online mob. Silencing dissent is the proximate aim, but the larger goal is to foster a culture in which nobody but the favoured express themselves freely in the first place….

Blacklisting is usually done quietly and behind closed doors. In my case, BFI management instructed curation and programming staff not to book me and not to tell me why. As these staff were people with whom I had good relationships, this was awkward for them. They were expected to lie to me — and they did.

Whilst the most energetic blacklisting is done by those who are driven by their politics and determined to exclude dissenters, much of it is done by those who just want a quiet life. They’re not zealots — they’re just trying to do their work without being derailed themselves by this punishing political culture….

I first expressed dissent from the dogma of gender identity ideology in 2018. Since then, I’ve been thrown off academic conferences, dragged through a malicious disciplinary process by my university, had activists and former colleagues campaigning to prevent me working, and I’m now aware of multiple instances of blacklisting.

But I’ve had it easy compared to the experiences of women such as Jenny Lindsay, who laid out the grim details of her own punishment within the Scottish poetry community in her essay “Anatomy of a Hounding”. If you’re wondering just how bad it can get, read her account.

As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie observed in her Reith Lecture a few years ago, this is an authoritarian movement which does not recognise its own authoritarianism. More than that, it is a movement which performs unctuous demonstrations of pretend love to its favoured minorities whilst its most gleaming-eyed true believers mete out dehumanising cruelty elsewhere. And it is a movement on the march, every year closer to a culture in which its politics is supreme, and everyone else is just afraid enough to be silent.

Josh Glancy in the Sunday Times talks to Nava and Zecharia Deutsch, Jewish chaplains at Leeds University – ‘We’re coming to kill you’: Jewish chaplains reveal campus threats – receiving 400 abusive calls in one night:

Nava Deutsch was naive the first time one of the calls came in. She had no idea what was about to happen.

It was the afternoon of February 8. A woman with a Yorkshire accent asked Nava how she was, and whether she thought students were safe on campus. Nava and her husband are chaplains at the University of Leeds, looking after Jewish students. She replied that yes, she did think students were safe on campus. She assumed it was a Jewish mother on the phone, worried about antisemitism.

The next question revealed the caller’s hand: “Your husband just got back from committing genocide? How can our kids be safe on campus? How many babies did he kill?”

Nava recalls: “My heart started racing. I just never expected anything like that.”

Phone calls started pouring in. WhatsApp messages too. Death threats. Rape threats. Nava’s husband, Zecharia, a rabbi, began to receive them as well. The couple quickly realised they were under a very real threat, and that their small three-bedroom house in Woodhouse, Leeds, had become a target.

“Tell that Jewish son of a bitch we’re coming for him,” said one male caller, speaking in a Yorkshire accent. “We’re coming to his house and we’re going to kill him, and you as well you f***ing racist bitch. Stupid little slag.”

Another caller said: “You killed innocent Muslims, and they’re going to get you. I promise you now, we’re going to get you, I’m going to get you. We’re going to follow you home from Leeds, you and your wife, and we’re going to do the f***ing same as you’ve been doing in Israel. Us Muslims are going to come for you, you dirty Zionist motherf***er.”

As about 400 calls and messages came in over one long evening and deep into the night, the couple rang the police. “One of the policewomen had tears in her eyes,” Nava recalls. “She said she’d never seen such disgusting messages.”

The written messages, which have been reviewed by The Sunday Times, were, if anything, worse. “On way now u dirty whore,” said one. “Gonna bend y over and f*** u up ya daft immigrant bitch. 15 min away tell your husband to get ready, f***ing immigrants.” Others were so sexually graphic as to be unprintable. […] The terraces of Woodhouse were a long way from the Holy Land, but the Deutschs settled in quickly. “Everyone in Leeds was very friendly, everyone called you ‘love’ and ‘dear’,” says Nava.

They had an interesting if unremarkable two years in Leeds, hosting Sabbath luncheons and study sessions. Then October 7 happened. And the world changed.

As a reservist, Zecharia was recalled to Israel after October 7th, and served as a guard for military supply convoys going in and out of Gaza at the height of the conflict, bringing food, medicine and ammunition. A video he posted to a WhatsApp group was leaked – and the abuse began.

Just after Zecharia returned home, a series of posts by the Muslim Association of Britain, Dilly Hussain, an online influencer, and Mothin Ali, who has subsequently become a prominent Green Party councillor in Leeds, provoked a torrent of threats and menace. In a TikTok post, later deleted, Ali referred to Zecharia as a “creep” and a “low-life” and said that “Leeds University should be protecting its students against this kind of animal”. He accused him of going to the Middle East to kill women and children.

Shortly after that, the phone threats started coming in. “I’m gonna shag you in front of your husband and kick the f*** out of u,” one message said. “We know your address,” said another caller. “We’re ten minutes away.”…

Rightly or wrongly, it’s not all that hard to see why students, particularly Muslim students with a strong emotional connection to the conflict, ended up protesting about a campus member serving in Gaza. For them, in a state of heightened emotion, the Deutschs became a local lightning rod for their distress over the Middle East.

But much of the worst and most menacing vitriol came from some of their Muslim neighbours, stirred up by Ali and others. Ali became a controversial figure in May when he was elected as a Green Party councillor. During his victory speech he promised to “raise the voice of Palestine” while in office and shouted “Allahu Akbar”. Last month Ali gained plaudits for attempting to calm rioting in his borough of Harehills.

“I feel that Ali should be dealing with issues related to Leeds, rather than the Palestinian cause,” says Zecharia. “I have no respect for him.”…

When shown evidence of Ali’s tirade against the Deutschs at the time, the Green Party told the Daily Mail that it “believes in free speech”.

The Deutschs’ sharpest disappointment is reserved for the university, which appears to have wished the issue away rather than properly addressed it. When the Deutschs sought to be involved in a Jewish event on campus after Zecharia’s return, rather than guaranteeing their safety the university suggested it might be better that the couple not attend.

The couple were contacted by student union representatives and while there has been some contact from the University of Leeds, which was involved in discussions about the couple’s security, the Deutschs say that nobody from the university has been in touch at any point to express any personal concern.

“It’s surreal,” says Nava. “I feel like people in authority are scared and intimidated. I would expect them to have more backbone. We are surprised that on a personal note they didn’t reach out to us. Absolutely nothing. These are people we worked with for three years. These people are leaders, but this whole time, no one took responsibility.”

There it is, in a nutshell. This appears largely, if not entirely, to be a case of Muslims fired up by local hate preachers – presumably with the by-now familiar backing of the Free Palestine left. It's the same dynamic that got five pro-Gaza single issue MPs elected in strongly Muslim areas. And the authorities meanwhile – the Greens, the university – look the other way.