Mick Hartley

So farewell then Thomas Bach. The beleaguered IOC president is stepping down next year, after presiding over the Olympics boxing farce. Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

To Bach and his IOC acolytes, in hock to a belief that your sex is whatever you say it is, womanhood can be determined by passport status. Except athletes do not compete at the Olympics using legal documents or self-declared gender identities. They compete using their bodies, with their capabilities governed by the immutable laws of human biology. And so when the International Boxing Association wrote to the IOC 14 months ago, disclosing that Lin and Khelif were XY, the arbiters of global sport were duty-bound to investigate immediately, to demand test results of their own.

The decision to brush that letter aside was purely political. The IOC disavowed the IBA five years ago, citing worries over its finances and governance, and no longer trust anything the organisation says. The upshot is that, for the past two Games, it has run Olympic boxing itself, overseeing the 2024 instalment through an ad-hoc body called the “Paris Boxing Unit”.

It has been a recipe for confusion and turmoil. The major sports are all controlled here by federations that have seen sense, prioritising fairness by ring-fencing the female category for biological women. Athletics acted in response to seeing three athletes with differences in sexual development on the women’s 800 metres podium at Rio 2016. Swimming understood it had a problem when Lia Thomas went from being the 554th-ranked male in the United States to winning a national collegiate title as a female. Cycling was forced to draw a line when Austin Killips, a post-puberty male, won a UCI stage race for women. But boxing, the most perilous sport at the Olympics, has been left at the mercy of the IOC, the most ideologically captured body of all.

It saw no issue in sending Angela Carini into the ring to face Khelif, only for the Italian to be dismantled inside 46 seconds by punches so hard she said she feared for her life. It was not just because it disputed the IBA’s findings, but because it believed the Algerian should never have been tested at all. Its much-vaunted eligibility “framework” is rights-led rather than scientific. This means, in essence, that it is prepared to ignore anything to do with Khelif’s chromosomes. All that matters is being perceived not to discriminate….

It is worth studying the precise details of the IBA letter describing the tests carried out on the boxers. Summarising the results as “abnormal”, it declares: “Chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.” It also includes imaging, for each athlete, of an X and a Y chromosome, highlighting that the tests were conducted at a Delhi laboratory certified by the Swiss-based International Organisation for Standardisation. But still the IOC maintains that the results are “arbitary”, not worth the paper they are written on.

The only possible conclusion is that the IOC simply does not want to listen, that it is more interested in burnishing its credentials as “inclusive” than in upholding what is fair. It is no wonder that Bach wanted to be nowhere near the boxers’ gold-medal presentations, instead delegating Khelif’s victory ceremony to Mustapha Berraf of Algeria, one of his arch-loyalists. He has, frankly, made himself foolish on this issue. He had been warned for six years that a story such as this could explode if the IOC did not draw clearer boundaries, but still he refused to react. Despite the IBA claiming that the fighters have been tested twice and that they are male, Bach insists there is no scientific means of discovering who is female.

Now, not before time, he has agreed to step aside next year, his credibility severely damaged by his handling of the controversy. It marks the dramatic culmination of a quite extraordinary episode. In the space of a single Games, the IOC has done nothing less than distort biological truth in a sport fraught with physical risk. In the eyes of many women, there could scarcely be a greater dereliction.

Given Rod Liddle's chosen vocation as something of a shit-stirrer against liberal pieties – tongue-in-cheek but calculatedly provocative – this piece in today's Sunday Times is a surprisingly (to me) fine piece of reporting. He goes back to his home town of Middlesborough after the riots:

The march was predicated upon a falsehood which everyone taking part knew was a falsehood. But that didn’t seem to matter, so long as they got a dust-up with the Old Bill and the chance to put through the windows of a few “Muslim” houses. Such as the front window belonging to Theophilus Abiagom, who isn’t a Muslim. He’d been dozing on the sofa with his little son when the rock came hurtling through the glass, not long after lunchtime last Sunday in Middlesbrough.

So a march to punish Muslims for the killing of three little girls in Southport, in which the subject is not a Muslim but a youth born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents, chose as one of its first victims a bloke who also wasn’t a Muslim. You get the feeling the demonstrators weren’t hugely picky about who got a bloody nose, or their car torched, or their front door kicked down. Religious affiliation was not copiously vetted: just skin colour.

In the end 400 or so inchoate yobbos, or yobbo fellow travellers, caused mayhem in my home town for reasons which, before the march, were never openly articulated. The total number of arrests for this fun-packed afternoon stands at 43, so far, with more to come. How did this happen in a town which has always been proud of the fact that it was built by immigrant labour (largely Irish, hence our fine Roman Catholic cathedral) and as a port, was long accustomed to living cheek by jowl with people from beyond our continent?

The grammatically remiss call to arms, festooned with emojis, came to a select group of likely adherents via Facebook, as indeed it had done at Hartlepool and Sunderland and Southport. These riots, or protests, were choreographed — one day Hartlepool, the next Sunderland and then Middlesbrough (which drew the short straw of Sunday afternoon). Durham was meant to be next but nobody turned up — a very different demographic.

The post was, of course, all in block capitals: “MORE AND MORE ATROCITIES HAPPENING EVERY WEEK … IT IS ABOUT TIME TO SHOW WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH AND WE WILL NOT ROLL OVER AND LET OUR COUNTRY BECOME A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY … STAND UP AND BE COUNTED … TIME TO PUT THE GREAT BACK IN BRITAIN.”

And yet in this long, self-pitying screed, what exactly the writer was complaining about was never actually explained: you want bad things to stop happening? Is that it? Maybe the writer didn’t actually know what they wanted, or simply feared his post would be spiked by Facebook if he wrote, “Come on, let’s beat up some foreigners”.

The local sender was a man who, according to his previous Facebook posts, had recently received a 150-hour community service order and a ban from all football grounds in England and Wales for three to five years. “Looks like I will be at a few more [Glasgow] Rangers games this season,” he added, with some pride.

You cannot overstate the involvement of football hooligans with these riots — and remember, the English Defence League was originally a convocation of balding, overweight football “supporters” clad in Stone Island jackets and bearing a grudge. So it was in Middlesbrough, as the crew stamped its way up Linthorpe Road singing “Tees, Tees, Teessiders” as if they were still in the Red Faction (Boro Ultras) quadrant of the Riverside stadium cheering on Middlesbrough FC.

It did not take long to get nasty, not least when they turned into frowsy, down-at-heel Parliament Road, which is home to a large Muslim community. Bricks were thrown, cars were trashed, windows broken. There was a battle with the local coppers and about one tenth of the crowd was arrested. They met with resistance from the local Muslims, too, who were also guilty of a certain vicious overreach. Gangs of young Asian lads armed with crowbars and the like went searching for anyone who looked a bit white and when they found them, beat them up….

Meanwhile the white marchers — and, it has to be said, they were all white — were bricking windows, vandalising cars and smashing up local Asian groceries, such as the corner shop owned by 54-year-old Parvez Akhtar, who works a 72-hour week. There are reports too that the peaceful marchers (as that original Facebook post insisted they would surely be) also looted that not notably Islamic institution, Tesco.

The reaction of most Middlesbrough folk was one of revulsion at the mayhem, which was put down to sheer thuggery, but also a certain realisation that this sort of confrontation had been brewing for an awfully long time — perhaps as far back as 2001 when, after the riots in Oldham and Bradford, a government inquiry suggested that Middlesbrough was named as a “future tension point”.

Andy Preston, the leftish, independent former mayor of Middlesbrough told me that he thought “Ninety per cent of the damage is being done by white British youths seeking thrills and adrenaline … they were indiscriminately smashing windows and causing chaos, not driven by ideology or genuine rage, but by a desire for excitement.” Preston added that he thought the far right had been “emboldened” and conceded that “normal people” felt they were not listened to when they raised concerns about immigration….

Meanwhile, Yasmin Khan is working from home right now and maybe for the foreseeable future. The charity she runs for victims of domestic violence is closed. She says she dare not go outside. She is frightened to park her car in case it gets set alight. Her young niece was spat at in the street.

“I don’t feel safe,” she told me. “I am absolutely on edge. We’re all working from home. People have been racially abused, women and girls. And I think this has been festering for a really long time. I never thought in my lifetime we would see this again.” Grasping towards a solution she blames the rise of the far right and the incendiary language used by “mainstream politicians” — I think she means the Tories and Nigel Farage. We need to use a different language, she says, and we ought to be part of the conversation….

There was never much racial discord in Middlesbrough. Not when I was growing up. But there has been an influx which has unbalanced the town, much as it has unbalanced similarly impoverished northern post-industrial redoubts. Its cheap housing — you can still buy a four-bed terrace in Middlesbrough for around £60,000 — has made it a useful dumping ground for successive governments….

But it is not all about racial identity and nationalism, or even perhaps mainly. While parts of Teesside thrive, Middlesbrough has been left behind. Its once bustling centre is close to moribund: nobody goes there any more.

It still suffers from the appalling depredations of the recession occasioned by the Conservative government in the 1980s — and by the architectural vandalism of the Labour councils at the same time. Ugly concrete flyovers to carry the A66 westward brutally bisect Middlesbrough and the giant out-of-town shopping centres have ripped the heart out of the commercial district.

The centre cannot hold because there is no longer a centre, no sense of a Middlesbrough community. Just two groups of people from different cultures. The impoverished whites who believe in a vision of our country which the British establishment now disdains and feels embarrassed about, and the Asians who cling to their own culture because in truth nobody ever tried to persuade them to adopt our own.

Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times:

Should women ever trust the Olympics again? This is what many will be asking themselves tonight as the closing ceremony plays out. But this is the wrong question. The correct one is, how much longer will women put up with the International Olympics Committee punching them in the face?

Photos of female boxers making protest “x” signs above their heads after their matches — emphasising that they have XX chromosomes and are therefore female, and implying that their opponents, Algeria’s welterweight Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s featherweight Lin Yu-ting who both won gold medals, are XY and therefore not — will be the emblematic images of women’s sport from the 2024 Olympics.

Well, we had four good years, gals! Four years when women were granted — and please forgive the inevitable sporting cliche here — a level playing field at the Olympics.

It’s only since 2012 — yes, ye olde 2012 — that women have been allowed to compete in every Olympics event. Women were at last graciously granted permission by the IOC to take part in the ski jump, because previously there was concern their uteruses would fall out — gosh, I hate it when that happens! It was also the first year there was women’s boxing at the Olympics.

Alas, that sweet taste of sporting equality endured only until 2016, when all three medals in the women’s 800m were won by athletes with XY chromosomes, meaning they are biologically male: Burundi’s Francine Niyonsaba, Kenya’s Margaret Wambui and — famously — South Africa’s Caster Semanya. These athletes all had a difference of sexual development (DSD), meaning they appeared to be girls at birth but were actually males with internal testes. Thus, after puberty they had the superior strength and speed that males have over females, which is the sole reason women’s sport exists as a separate category. “Being born with internal testicles doesn’t make me less of a woman,” Semanya later said, to which the response is: Well, it does mean you shouldn’t compete against women.

When GB’s Lynsey Sharp complained in 2016 about being denied a medal because of the three DSD runners, she was barraged with death threats. “Lynsey is a good runner. She would’ve been even better if she’d just bit her lip and trained,” Semanya sniped in her 2023 memoir, The Race to Be Myself.

By failing to deal with the DSD issue then, the IOC left Semanya, Wambui and Niyonsaba open to intrusive speculation, and denied women athletes their deserved medals.

Their tactic this time was to tell journalists not to use “harmful” (aka factual) terms, such as “biological male” when referring to trans or DSD athletes. Yes, far more important to prevent harmful words than harmful punches! Because unlike the 2016 Olympics, the problem here is not speed but violence, and male boxers have on average 162 per cent greater punching power than female ones. The IOC knows this, and they also know that Khelif and Lin have a DSD. This month the IOC president, Thomas Bach, huffily insisted, “This is not a DSD case”, only for the IOC to issue a hasty correction that Bach had meant to say, “This is not a transgender case”, ie, it is a DSD case.

And still they let women (the irrelevant XX kind) be pummelled by them and then insisted that anyone who objected was engaging in “hate speech”, as Bach put it. On Friday Bach made like a Labour MP circa 2019 and pretended there is no way of knowing what a woman is. He said: “If someone is presenting us with a scientifically solid system how to identify men and women … we would be more than pleased.” Well, he could push them down a ski slope and see if their uterus falls out? Or the IOC could take a swab from inside their cheeks, which is all a sex test involves.

There's now a 100% success rate for men boxing in the women's Olympics, after Lin Yu-ting followed Imane Khelif in gaining a gold medal, after another one-sided bout as he pursued his hapless opponent round the ring, punching at will:

Lin fighting for gold. Already in the lead pic.twitter.com/RS50nCPWM8

— FairPlayForWomen (@fairplaywomen) August 10, 2024

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Both men, Khelif and Yu-ting, won every round in every match on their way to gold.

Look at the tattoos on his arm—Mohammad Mehdi Karami’s only dream was to compete in the Olympics. But the Islamic Republic executed him for joining the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests after #MahsaAmini’s murder. Yet, this regime still participates in the Olympics as if it’s a… pic.twitter.com/2E4qrnRjfi

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) August 10, 2024

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"Yet, this regime still participates in the Olympics as if it’s a normal country while imprisoning his father for speaking out.

"The Middle East is a tragic place where true heroes are buried and forgotten.💔"

Mohammad-Mehdi Karami (22) was a member of the karate team in Iran until he was tortured and executed by the Iranian regime on 7 January 2023.

Helen Joyce has a long piece  – the "weekend essay" – in today's Times, on the threat by new Labour education secretary Bridget Phillipson to abandon the recently introduced law to protect free speech in universities.

I’ve lost count of the academics — and journalists, teachers, medics and others — who have told me they censored themselves to avoid blowing up their jobs and, ultimately, their lives. Yet when I say cancel culture is alive and well on British campuses, I’m told that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

It’s an amazingly popular line, given its similarity to the words of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who said his opponents had freedom of speech but not freedom after it….

Enter the star of this story, Hefosa, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Passed last year under the Conservatives, it was designed to give teeth to universities’ free speech duties by adding an enforcement mechanism. Universities would have to lodge plans to protect free speech with the Office for Students (OfS), which would run a complaints scheme to investigate and punish breaches.

In the last resort, complaints could be taken to the civil courts. In an excellent sign that the OfS was taking its new mission seriously, it appointed Professor Ahmed as its first director of free speech. Then on July 26, six days before Hefosa was due to come into force, came a political assassination. Bridget Phillipson, the new Labour education secretary, abruptly put the act on hold, saying that all options were being considered, up to and including repeal.

For those of us who saw Hefosa as a modest yet useful step towards restoring free speech on campus, this came as a shock. But not, once we had reflected, a surprise. The case for what Greg Lukianoff, author of The Canceling of the American Mind, calls the “eternally radical idea” needs to be constantly remade. Free speech is always and everywhere despised by the powerful, who think it will be easier to silence opponents than win them over. That the left has fallen out of love with free speech in recent years is the clearest possible sign of its cultural ascendancy.

Free speech doesn’t only protect underdogs; it protects societies from catastrophic error. It is two decades since whistleblowers first revealed the outrages being perpetrated against children in gender clinics. Not until the publication in April of Dr Hilary Cass’s review of NHS child gender medicine were they vindicated. For many years, Cass said, researchers and healthcare providers had been too afraid to share their views or discuss alternative treatment models.

How much of this back-tracking is due to pressure from vice-chancellors, keen to keep the money flowing in as universities find themselves struggling for cash?

The only way to keep the show on the road is to lure in ever more foreign students — and that leaves universities beholden to governments for whom free speech is not even on the agenda. Above all, that means China, which sends the largest number of students to the UK: 150,000 at any one time. “Many British universities would be looking at bankruptcy within a matter of years if they lost their Chinese students and didn’t manage to replace them,” says Sam Dunning, director of UK China Transparency, a think tank. “So they are desperate to have a good relationship with the Chinese government.”

The Chinese Communist Party influences what can be said on UK campuses in three ways. It supplies direct funding, much of it for Confucius Institutes staffed largely by Chinese nationals it selects. It denies visas to foreign scholars of China who hold non-approved opinions. Most importantly, the students it permits to study abroad know their future careers and families’ wellbeing depend upon them countering criticism of China during their courses and reporting back on fellow students who step out of line.

To see how seriously UK university managers take any threat to the inflow of Chinese students, consider the case of Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor at University College London. Almost a quarter of all the institution’s students are from China, the largest Chinese cohort in the UK. For the past decade Shipworth has taught a module on data to master’s students in which she discusses a statistical ranking from 2014.

The ranking puts China in second place globally for the number of its people in forced labour. It is based on shoddy data and uncovering its failings is the point of the exercise. Even so, earlier this year one of her Chinese students complained that the example was “provocative”. First students and then colleagues reported her for “anti-Chinese prejudice”, citing her teaching and her diligence in uncovering cheating, for which two of her Chinese students were expelled.

The allegations were dismissed but colleagues forced her to stop using the slavery example, before her head of department took the course away from her. “[In] order to be commercially viable,” he told her in an email, “our MSc courses need to retain a good reputation amongst future Chinese applicants.”

“For a long time there has been a conspiracy of silence about these issues,” says Dunning. “[Hefosa] would have been a massive change.” OfS draft guidelines made clear that Confucius Institutes would have had to obey UK non-discrimination laws on hiring. When academics are denied Chinese visas on political grounds, their institutions would have been expected to issue a public condemnation. Universities would have had to do more to ensure that foreign funding did not distort their scholarship and to protect their students from ideological surveillance.

Since going public with her story, Shipworth said she has heard from academics around the country who have been told to drop criticisms of China and turn a blind eye to evidence of cheating. Her head of department and colleagues seemed to understand neither their duties nor their obligations concerning academic freedom, she said. “They thought they were completely within their rights to do what they did to me. I know from discussion groups I’m in that censorship and self-censorship are routine across all universities now.”

If the last-gasp attempts to save Hefosa fail, who should be held responsible for its demise? If this was a game of Cluedo, the denouement would be that vice-ch­ancellors did the deed in the corridors of Westminster by wielding threats of their sector’s collapse. For many of those running the country’s universities, free speech is not merely an unnecessary frippery — it is a burden they would rather be rid of.

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

The smouldering scandal of these Paris Games has reached the most explosive possible conclusion, with a biologically male boxer winning an Olympic gold medal as a female. Imane Khelif, the 25-year-old Algerian whose DNA tests have shown the male pattern of XY chromosomes, has swept all the way to the women’s welterweight title after dismantling four successive opponents in four utterly one-sided contests. The outcome of which the International Olympic Committee had for so long been warned – that an overwhelming focus on inclusion could remove fair sport for women – has finally come to pass.

It has been the starkest illustration of a failure of governance at the highest level of global sport. By allowing biological males to fight as women through pure self-ID, the IOC have caused irreparable damage to their claims of protecting the sanctity and integrity of the female category. Khelif celebrated extravagantly by dancing on the spot as the unanimous decision was announced, before being swept out of the ring on the shoulders of the Algerian support staff.

The roar was ear-splitting as the huge Algerian contingent sought to uphold Khelif’s honour. But the ramifications of these extraordinary events, you sense, might only just be beginning. This was the wholly logical outcome of the IOC neglecting to reach any plausible conclusion of the definition of a woman, allowing the lines of biology to be blurred in the most lethal sport of all. Barely believably, the crisis could become worse still, with Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting, a second boxer deemed ineligible for the female category by boxing chiefs, the favourite for gold on Saturday night after also being given a free pass into the Olympic Games.

Here's the image -  a man hitting a woamn as hard as he can, to cheers from the crowd and an Olympic gold medal:

[Photo: AP/Ariana Cubillos]

Manhattan ca. 1913. "Suburban concourse with ramp, Grand Central Terminal, New York Central Lines." A surreal image of spectral figures populating the Grand Central concourse, thanks to the flash-powder time exposure. It helps that the men with moustaches and hats look to be straight out of a Rene Magritte painting.

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

Women of WRN Afghanistan stand with all women being disadvantaged by males in their sports. We are XX not XY. Men will use their strength to try to keep us down but women will always fight on @WomensRightsNet #XX#SaveWomensSport pic.twitter.com/EuHn7qLi3I

— WRN Afghanistan (@WRNAfghanistan) August 9, 2024

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The BMA is looking increasingly isolated after its call for opposition to the Cass Review has been met with a barrage of criticism from leading doctors – "simply not acceptable" – as well as Seen (Sex Equality and Equity Network), The Association of Clinical Psychologists UK (ACP-UK) and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.

Jo Bartosch at UnHerd:

Traditionally, unions are supposed to represent their members. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the BMA is dangerously out of step with the medical consensus. The Cass Review has sent ripples across the world, and from lawsuits in the US to a change of tack across Europe — medics are increasingly acknowledging that what is a crisis in youth mental health cannot be cured by changing bodies.

Had a world leading clinician spent four years investigating childhood diseases or treatments for anxiety, the findings would be accepted without controversy. It is because the Cass Review sought scientific evidence for ideologically rooted treatments that her work has been dismissed by transgender activists, including clinicians like Prof Banfield. It seems so-called “gender medicine” is so mired in identity politics that scrutiny or the application of basic standards is considered a threat.

There can be few things more chilling than a medic on a messianic mission, particularly when one heads an institution as august as the British Medical Association (BMA). The trans trend is finally coming to an end, and if the BMA is to stay relevant, it must move on.

A report from Alex Crawford at Sky News on the mainly Kudish Syrian Democratic Forces, still hunting IS in the refugee camps on the Syrian-Iraq border, and rescuing Yazidi women like Kovan:

Kovan, who is 24 years old, told her rescuers that IS took her captive alongside her family when they stormed Sinjar. She was just 14, the eldest of four sisters with an older brother. She was taken to the Al Hol camp after the extremist group collapsed, where, she says, IS families abused her for being Yazidi.

Within days of her capture, Kovan was paraded in front of IS fighters who bought her and then took her home to be raped and beaten. Sold multiple times, she was moved around IS territory from Mosul to Raqqa and then to Baghouz.

The first man who bought her was twice her age. She hadn't even started menstruating. As she recalls the horrific abuse she suffered, there is a mix of anger and sorrow in her voice. When she tried to run away, he dragged her back by her hair and beat her. "He said he'd kill me and bury me in his backyard if I didn't do what he wanted."

"I was raped every day for two years," she says. Her tone is matter-of-fact but her eyes indicate a deep pain. Her two children were born of rape by two separate IS men, both of whom are now believed to be dead.

During that time, she also witnessed a 10-year-old child being raped.

Now, Kovan wants the men who defiled her, and the IS wives who helped them, to be held accountable for their actions.

"The women were just as bad," she says. "They knew what their husbands were doing. They dressed us and put makeup on us so we could be raped by their husbands"….

Kovan's freedom is bittersweet. Upon her return, her surviving family showered her with sweets, sang and hugged her in delight and relief on having her returned to them. But her smile seemed skin-deep. Her trauma will take years to overcome, if she can conquer it at all. And she knows that. She has survived a genocide, a massacre and unthinkable brutality.

Only justice will bring her peace but so far there has been only a handful of persecutions worldwide for what Britain, and many other countries, now recognise as genocide against the Yazidis.