Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Olympic boxing

    The Olympics at last gives us the opportunity to watch a man beating the shit out of a woman in the boxing ring. Ah, the sporting life! Here's Olympic spokesman Mark Adams justifying the decision to allow two men – Lin Yu-ting and Imane Khelif – to compete against women: it says they're women on their passports, and anyway – the familiar excuse – it's all incredibly complex. People have been happily distinguishing between men and women for all of human history, but now, suddenly, it's "incredibly complex".

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    Even the IBA – the International Boxing Association – felt obliged to issue a dissenting statement:

    On 24 March 2023, IBA disqualified athletes Lin Yu-ting and Imane Khelif from the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships New Delhi 2023. This disqualification was a result of their failure to meet the eligibility criteria for participating in the women’s competition, as set and laid out in the IBA Regulations. This decision, made after a meticulous review, was extremely important and necessary to uphold the level of fairness and utmost integrity of the competition.

    Point to note, the athletes did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential. This test conclusively indicated that both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors….

    Our Committees have rigorously reviewed and endorsed the decision made during the World Championships. While IBA remains committed to ensuring competitive fairness in all of our events, we express concern over the inconsistent application of eligibility criteria by other sporting organizations, including those overseeing the Olympic Games. The IOC’s differing regulations on these matters, in which IBA is not involved, raise serious questions about both competitive fairness and athletes’ safety.

    One wonders what this confidential "separate and recognized test" was, that ruled these two out of contention. Pulling down their pants and having a look at their genitals, perhaps?

    [Added: it seems likely that these two, Lin Yu-ting and Imane Khelif, have the same developmental disorder as Caster Semenya – so, yes, probably no or tiny male genitalia, but XY chromosomes and male levels of testosterone after the usual male puberty.]

    A protest is planned.

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    Update: 

    The controversial fight between Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who failed a sex test at last year’s World Championships, and Italy’s Angela Carini has been abandoned after just 46 seconds after the Italian suffered a suspected broken nose.

    This fight had already detonated ferocious controversy, with the International Olympic Committee under mounting pressure to explain how a woman could be allowed into a boxing ring unsure of the sex of the person she was facing.

    Khelif was banned from competing in a gold-medal bout in Delhi by the International Boxing Association, who said that the fighter’s “elevated levels of testosterone failed to meet the eligibility criteria”.

    And yet she was still permitted by the IOC to fight at these Olympics and the difference in power was clear from the beginning, with the Italian taking a punch to the face and immediately walking to her corner to signal she would not carry on.

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  • Night rail yard

    Jack Delano, March 1943. Kansas City, Kansas. "Argentine Yard, Santa Fe R.R. — Night view of the departure yard on the route of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

  • The anti-imperial, anti-Zionism of fools

    Richard Landes in Fathom – see Graham's comment here – on how the supremacism built into Islam from its foundation could never accept a Jewish state on Arab-Muslim land:

    The unimaginable success of the imperial expansion of the first century of Islam fed this triumphalist strain among followers of the Prophet. It led to the division of the world into dar al Islam and dar al Harb: where Muslims rule is the realm of submission, where they do not, is the realm of the sword where infidels who have yet to submit to Islam are harbi – destined to the sword.

    The reason why the Arab world, and the Muslim-Arab world in particular, find Israel categorically unacceptable goes back to the doctrine of Dar al Harb, Dar al Islam. The land between the river and sea became a key part of the exploding Arab-Muslim empire – Dar al Islam – in the 7th century. Fast forward some 14 centuries, and the dissolution of the Caliphate in 1924 (the first ‘Nakba’) put an end to Dar al Islam formally. In the eyes of the West, Islam, the millennia-long foe, had been put in its place.

    But this triumphalist vision of a world ultimately entirely submitted to Allah (through Islam) lived on, taking on a more modern form, more powerful and effective than the Ottoman basket case. Hassan al-Banna formed the Muslim Brotherhood (1927), a multi-generational plan to revive true Islam, fight the forces of secular modernity making inroads in the Arab world whose progress al-Banna saw as a regression to the ‘Jahaliyya,’ i.e. the ‘Ignorance’ of the pre-Islamic Arab world. He sought a long-term, multi-generational goal of a new salvific and eventually global Caliphate in which Muslims ruled according to Sharia: Where there was Dar al Harb, there shall be Dar al Islam.

    For al-Banna, his triumphalist followers and sympathisers, the demotion of Islam in the eyes of the nations that had occurred through the military and cultural success of Western imperial-colonialists, threatened the very religion itself: ‘a declaration of war on all shapes of Islam.’ For them, Islam must dominate. Few forces today that seek global hegemony are so open about their imperial ambitions.

    In the minds of supremacists like al Banna, therefore, the creation of Israel was a further catastrophe in this long war on Islam, the loss of territory in the heart of what was and should be dar al Islam, and a denial of Muslim imperial claims. The core of the Arab-Muslim irredentist demand that Israel be destroyed, is a direct expression of this imperialist Islam from its first century. Free infidels are anathema to Islam’s triumphalist sovereignty. ‘We cannot concede a grain of sand to Jews.’ For Abul A’la al-Maududi, the most systematic thinker of modern Islam explained, Jews must exist in the state of submission.  […]

    Nothing could be more catastrophic than the Jews, historically the weakest and most cowardly of the dhimmi, establishing an autonomous state in the heart of (what should be) Dar al Islam. (Scholars of shame-honor cultures note that as long as a humiliating fact [e.g. a wife’s infidelity] isn’t made public, it is bearable.) A Jewish state in Palestine was just such a public announcement of Muslim impotence.

    And yet, that is precisely what happened. And the response to the catastrophe was to imprison the refugees from Palestine in ‘refugee camps’ (where most still live) and swear eternal enmity to the ‘Zionist entity.’ Here one finds the key triumphalist response among Arabs to Israel’s inexplicable and blasphemous success, a response that has dominated Arab leaders with few exceptions, to present: make your own people suffer as a way to promote the war you won’t admit you lost.

    This is not a position that westerners generally understand. Far easier to try and squeeze it all into what they do understand: imperialism, laced with copious references to genocide and the Nazis…well hey, it's the Jews here, and who doesn't love pointing out history's supposed ironies, turning the Holocaust back on its victims.

    The notion that Israel is an imperial-colonial entity, the last and worst embodiment of Western imperialism, and that Palestinians are fighting it for freedom and dignity, is perhaps the single most egregious mistake currently made by the ‘social warriors’ who support Hamas. Hamas, and the entire spectrum of Palestinian parties, all openly fight to take away Jewish freedom and dignity, which the Jews defend with exceptional restraint. The anti-imperial, anti-Zionism of fools repeats the Jihadi imperial, irredentist chant, ‘Min el–maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya’ (From water to water, Palestine will be Arab) imagining they are partaking in a global struggle for freedom and dignity, and certainly not – heaven forbid! – strengthening the most ruthless, religious imperialism on the planet, which has them on their target list.

  • BBC bias revisited

    Nicole Lampert at the JC on the BBC's anti-Israel bias:

    The BBC regularly trumpets itself as the nation’s most trusted news brand. And if the nation"s most trusted news brand is intent on demonising Israel, focuses on stories about the bombing of schools in Gaza without explaining they are Hamas holdouts, never queries people when they call the Israel-Gaza war "genocide" and positions stories so that it seems that even when children in Israel are killed, somehow it is the fault of Israel for being there (and they are no longer children but young people) doesn’t it stand to reason that the people who support this "genocidal baby-killing" must be monsters?

    And isn't it then practically incumbent on good caring people to despise these Israel-supporting Jews who turn out to be just as bad as everyone said?

    I don't know a single Jewish person who isn’t concerned about BBC bias. The people who are most critical of all, are the Jewish people who work at the Beeb. They have concern not only about the output but – for at least some of them – a hostile work environment. Mostly they whisper painfully, "It's an absolute sh*t show". A few are still wondering whether they can stay.

    For some Jewish BBC staff, the corporation has an unconscious bias to always see Israeli as the aggressor, and the Palestinians the victims.

    No surprise, then, that the BBC is lost for words at the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh. Why would the Israelis do such a horrible thing? Haniyeh was "moderate and pragmatic"; he was  "involved in the ceasefire and hostage release talks", which of course were going so well. Yes, he had $4 billion to live on in his life of luxury in Qatar while he happily sacrificed the people of Gaza as martyrs in the cause – "we need this blood so that it will ignite within us the spirit of revolution". – but no need to mention any of that when they have the bad guys, the Israelis, clear in their sights.

  • Good news from the gender wars

    Last April:

    Laura Favaro is the academic at City University who's been researching the silencing, discrimination and harassment of female academics who raise questions about gender identity theory. With a nice sense of irony the university authorities decided that Favaro's research was dangerous – thereby herself becoming another example to add to her database – and confiscated her work . She's now raising funds to take the case to an Employment Tribunal.

    Now, good news:

    I have excellent news: City, University of London and I have settled my Employment Tribunal claim and I hope soon to be regaining access to the rest of my research data (survey). I am extremely pleased with the resolution that we have reached….

    I hope shortly to be able to publish on all the data from my 'gender wars' research project. My latest article, entitled Let Us Be Free from ‘Academentia’, explores the detrimental impact of queer theory and politics at universities and beyond. Those of you interested in my work can check for updates on my X account, @DrLauraFavaro, as this CrowdJustice page will close today.

  • Back in the USSR

    The tropes of today's demonisation of Israel as a racist coloniser, oppressing the brave Palestinians in their noble anti-imperialist struggle, were originally set out by the Soviets back in the Sixties. Izabella Tabarovsky in Tablet on the left’s addiction to "warmed-over Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda from half a century ago":

    What’s so interesting about this half-century-old Soviet propaganda is how precisely it mirrors the language emanating from the anti-Israel left since Oct. 7. Today’s left, too, speaks of Israel as a racist, imperialist, and colonialist state; equates it with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa; disparages Jews for having turned into oppressors; and proclaims Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist their colonial oppression by any means necessary.

    A quick excursion into the Soviet-sponsored Third World, aka the left-wing universe of yesteryear, helps put many things into perspective—from the disastrous “anti-racism” U.N. conference in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 that launched a massive new global wave of anti-Israel demonization to the current grotesque spectacle of progressives using “anti-colonialism” to justify the mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of civilians in a land where Jews have lived for more than 3,000 years of their collective history as memorialized in the works of Greek and Roman historians; monumental inscriptions by neighboring kingdoms; such globally recognized works as the New Testament, the Koran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls; and by world-famous monuments like the Arch of Titus in Rome.

    That what we are watching is less an upsurge of a new and terrifying phenomenon than the zombielike repetition of the state-sponsored propaganda of a dead empire that was hardly known for truth-telling explains why the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist prattle of today’s college students feels like déjà vu to those of us who grew up in the USSR. We’ve heard it all before: anti-imperialism mixed with anti-Zionist sloganeering; anti-racism interwoven with the demonization of the Jews; incantations about “world peace” and “friendship of the peoples” intertwined with the fomenting and financing of wars in faraway lands. One example in particular stands out as an illustration of profound Soviet cynicism with regard to the Third World: While calling for the boycott of the apartheid regime in every international forum, Moscow didn’t for one second stop trading diamonds with South African companies De Beers and Anglo American. As perestroika got underway and Soviet foreign policy priorities began to shift, some in Moscow started reaching out to the South African regime to convince it not to surrender power to Nelson Mandela.

    Those who try to explain the contemporary left’s anti-Israel derangement by pointing to the latest academic fashions, such as critical race theory and intersectionality, or to specific news events of the day often miss the point that the precise language used by the anti-Israel left today to condemn the Jewish State has been a conventional part of left-wing discourse for decades—and that it originated in the USSR. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, wrote Stephen Norwood, the American far left “repeatedly denounced Israel as a criminal regime resembling Nazi Germany and enthusiastically endorsed the Arab guerilla movement’s campaign to eradicate the Jewish state.” Similar trends were on view in the United Kingdom. “By the early 1970s, it was generally accepted across the [British] far left that Zionism was a racist ideology and that Israel was comparable to apartheid South Africa,” wrote Dave Rich in Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present.

    So why wasn't all this nonsense discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Why didn't the left acknowledge its egregious errors? Well – that's not how it works. Too much had already been invested by sections of the left in the centrality of Zionism as the spider at the centre of a web of evil imperialism – and figures like, say, Jeremy Corbyn, are not noted for their flexibility of thought, or their willingness to change their thinking in the light of new evidence and new circumstances. And, of course, it plays very nicely into the antisemitism that never quite goes away.

    Somehow, liberal America has slept through all of it. Having won the Cold War, it didn’t even bother to disarm and discredit the ideas it opposed, the way it had after it defeated Nazi Germany. Too many American intellectuals had been leftists or had leftist parents or had been fellow travelers with leftist causes to want to look too closely at the moral and physical rot of the empire that America defeated—a victory that moreover belonged to the arch-enemy of the American left, Ronald Reagan. Why give Reagan and his fellow anti-communists and troglodyte McCarthy-ites credit for having been right?

    That the left has held onto the Soviet language of anti-Zionist struggle, down to retaining the same stilted epithets, despite the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union is a testament to the disenchantment of Western liberals with what they should have remembered as a heroic and deeply meaningful struggle that rescued close to a billion people around the world from totalitarian slavery. It also testifies to the enduring utility of anti-Zionism as a political tool. Throughout the Cold War, this ideology helped unite political actors with agendas so different as to be virtually irreconcilable; it continues to do the same today. Anti-Zionism allows the Western left to ally itself with jihadists, who stand against everything the progressive left has ever claimed to represent. That these crude, immoral politics and ideology, shaped by illiberal, anti-Western, anti-democratic regimes with the blood of millions on their hands, are being presented to young Americans as the main paradigm to make sense of the world is a scandalous historical irony.

    Young Americans and young Brits.

  • Intermission

    Off for a week. Back Thurs 1st August. [Well OK, Wed 31st July as it happens.]

  • How extreme ideology infects and then destroys organisations

    Euan McColm on the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre debacle:

    It's very difficult not to feel that rape victims in Scotland’s capital city have been used as part of a grubby experiment.

    When Mridul Wadhwa applied for the position of chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre in 2021, she should not have been invited to interview.

    The post was expressly advertised as being for women only, yet Wadhwa, a biological male who identifies as a woman and who was not in possession of a gender recognition certificate, was not only interviewed, but was given the job, and then celebrated by the great and the good. Of course, a selfie with Nicola Sturgeon exists.

    We now know – thanks to the findings of an employment tribunal last month – that Ms Wadhwa was involved in “a heresy hunt” against a former staff member who held the surely uncontroversial view that a woman who has suffered rape is entitled to know whether the support worker assigned to them is male or female.

    Roz Adams was hounded out of her job by someone utterly unfit for leadership.

    It has emerged this week that, quietly, Wadhwa has been placed on leave pending the outcome of an investigation into the circumstances of Ms Adams departure. Given the strength of condemnation from the tribunal last month, it seems unlikely that the chief executive will return to the organisation.

    I’m certain those who hired Ms Wadhwa and those who cheered on this great “progressive” act would like the whole messy business to be forgotten. But it should not be. Indeed, the Wadhwa case stands as the perfect example of how extreme ideology infects and then destroys organisations. Not only must it not be forgotten but lessons must be learned from it….

    The same government-funded activist groups that cheered on former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s unworkable plans to allow trans people to self-ID saw Ms Wadhwa’s appointment as a significant victory in an ideologically-driven campaign. Ms Wadhwa, I’m afraid, was not hired because this was the best outcome for those women using the services of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre but because the appointment symbolised “progress”.

    It should not be remarkable to say that Ms Wadhwa should never have been appointed to the position she continues, for the time being, to hold.

    But we know that accusations of transphobia – sometimes career-ending – are liable to follow any criticism of this “pioneering” figure.

    The contemporary trans rights movement, with its violent slogans and its refusal to accept biological reality, has cowed many politicians into silence. Fearful of being accused of bigotry, too many say nothing even when faced with situations that – to most voters – are, at best, absurd and, at worst, downright dangerous.

    Not only was Ms Wadhwa involved in an ideological campaign against a devoted and experienced support worker, but under their regime Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre appears to have offered support to a biologically male sexual predator with “hostility towards women”.

    Last week, Cameron Downing, a former equalities officer with the SNP who identifies as ‘non-binary’ was given a nine-year prison sentence for a catalogue of sex attacks. A video later emerged in which he thanked ERCC for its help.

    To the list of statements which should, surely, be uncontroversial might we add “dangerous male predators should not have access to support services for vulnerable women”?

    It should be pointed out that ERCC’s service, according to the organisation’s website, is open to anyone who ‘self identifies as a woman, trans woman, trans man or non-binary person’.

    It is a sign of how tight the activists’ grip is on government that no minister has felt the need to say much about the scandal at Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre….

    Mridul Wadhwa should never have been put in charge of a service for vulnerable women.

    Those responsible for the appointment would very much like us all to forget what they did. We must not do so.

    Some incredibly vulnerable women have been failed by a service corrupted by a pernicious ideology. The employment of Mridul Wadhwa as chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre was an experiment that went badly wrong.

    It's an extraordinary story – and it's not over yet.

  • Hulking transgender athletes

    From the Mail – Hulking transgender athletes take gold, silver and bronze spots on female podium at Washington cycling championship. That "hulking" gets the point across: these are men, stealing women's prizes. 

    Transgender athletes swept the board in a 1-2-3 at a prestigious women's cycle race over the weekend, infuriating fans and leaving female competitors in the shade.

    Every medalist in the elite women's Madison at Washington's Marymore Grand Prix on Friday had a trans athlete on the two–person team, marking the first time trans women are known to have had a place on every podium spot in a race.

    Race venue the Jerry Baker Memorial Velodrome in Redmond warns it will not tolerate 'bullying or derogatory comments especially related to race, creed, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, physical or mental disability'.

    But the sight of the heavily-built winners towering over their rivals and teammates on the podium has dismayed fans of the sport.

    'This is so egregious I can't imagine how people watched this happen and thought this was ok,' wrote one.

    Give men an opening like this and some will take it. That, sadly, is the way it is. Everyone can see it's crazy – but still it continues.

  • Aesop was right

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