Mick Hartley

Melanie Phillips, interviewed by Brendan O'Neill at Spiked:

Anti-Zionism is a polite fiction, designed to conceal the fact that people want to hate Jews. In theory, of course, it is distinct from anti-Semitism. That is, if you take Zionism to be nothing more than a political movement that began in the 19th century. But this is simply no longer the case. Zionism is a movement for the self-determination of Jewish people in their homeland. And no other group on Earth is told, as the Jews often are, that they are not entitled to a homeland.

Self-determination for Jews in Israel is an essential component of Judaism itself. That doesn’t mean that all Jews are Zionists. That doesn’t mean that all Jews want to live in Israel. And it doesn’t mean all Jews support Israel. But it does mean that anti-Zionism, in many ways, is a dagger to the heart of Judaism. It deprives the Jews of their home.

People often respond to this by saying that a lot of Jews are anti-Zionists today and that many Jews were opposed to Zionism at the turn of the 20th century. That is absolutely correct. But there is a tremendous difference between then and now. These Jews were anti-Zionists before the Holocaust and before Israel existed. They made their case before people even began to understand that the Arab and Muslim world was determined to remove all Jews from their homeland. The context now is that anti-Zionism would entail the destruction of Israel – a state that is essential for the continuation of the Jewish people because, crucially, other countries would not take Jews in. […]

After the Second Intifada, a liberal journalist said to me that I had got the whole anti-Semitism thing completely wrong. What we were seeing was not anti-Semitism, he said, but ‘relief’ that we ‘don’t have to worry about the Jews anymore’. It was an ambiguous comment, so I asked him what he meant. He said: ‘Well, after the concentration camps, anti-Semitism was completely forbidden. We couldn’t say what we thought about the Jews. Until now.’ He was effectively saying that because Israel is defending itself against mass murder, the Jew had become the Nazi – and with one bound, anti-Semites were free.

I do think that there is something in this. The West really can’t cope with the fact that it was complicit in the greatest crime in human history. Germany was the centre of it, of course, but the Holocaust happened because people turned their faces away from the rampant anti-Semitism at the time. Making the Jew into a Nazi effectively frees the West. After all, if the Jews can become Nazis, then any of us can. And so there was nothing particularly terrible about the Nazis and nothing particularly terrible about our failure to deal with it at the time.

There is a feeling among the Jews that Westerners have had it up to here with the Jewish people. They don’t want to hear about the Jews ever again. They want the Jews out of their heads, out of their consciences and out of their world altogether. And they certainly don’t want to hear about the Jew as a victim. That’s why people ignore anti-Semitism. That’s why people ignore the rape of Israeli women. That’s why you have this attempt to turn the great crime of 7 October into a great crime by Israel.

Nothing is allowed to disturb the narrative that the Jews are responsible for bad things. They are never the victims of bad things. If that narrative is ever challenged, if the Jews were no longer the West’s scapegoat, it would have to take responsibility for its own misdeeds. It would no longer be able to avoid its own moral culpability. That cannot be allowed to happen.

The "anti-socialist" crusade in North Korea has become a paranoid national obsession. From the Daily NK:

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on July 9 that the Ministry of Social Security, the Ministry of State Security and the Central Prosecutors Office recently collaborated in drafting a notice on “intensifying the partywide struggle to firmly smash the enemies’ plots to strangle the republic and thoroughly eliminate anti-socialist and non-socialist acts.”

The cooperation of the three main law enforcement organizations behind the draft notice is aimed at preventing young people from drifting away from the ruling ideology.

In the draft notice, the three organizations said that “the ideology of our enemies is cleverly infiltrating our youth” and stressed the need to “eradicate the resistance to admitting anti-socialist and non-socialist behavior committed in the past on the assumption that nobody knows about it.”

North Korean authorities appear to be stepping up their crackdown on forbidden behavior after concluding that the “Youth Education Guarantee Act,” which was enacted in September 2021 to tighten ideological control over young people, has not been entirely successful in keeping young people in the ideological fold.

“Despite harsher punishments, young people are still avoiding hardship posts and engaging in various illegal behaviors, such as usury and smuggling. The government believes that if young people are contaminated with capitalist ideology, the future of the revolution will be jeopardized,” the source said.

They could be right about that.

Meanwhile:

North Korea has recently intensified its crackdown on the viewing and distribution of foreign media, particularly targeting South Korean content. In a recent case in Kaechon, South Pyongan Province, two individuals received severe sentences for their involvement with South Korean videos.

A source in South Pyongan Province, speaking anonymously for security reasons, revealed on Sunday that two individuals were harshly sentenced earlier this month. A man in his 30s, identified as “A,” received seven years of “reform through labor” for borrowing an SD card containing South Korean films. “B,” a woman in her 50s who lent the card, was sentenced to 15 years.

B’s sentence was notably harsher due to her conviction for both possessing and distributing South Korean media. The pair were arrested in May when police raided A’s home, catching him watching the borrowed content. During questioning, A implicated B, leading to her arrest.

Many of us will no doubt have thought to ourselves that youngsters nowadays just don't have the same youth cultures that thrived when we were growing up – but, in my case anyway, kept quiet because, well, it's not like I'm an expert about current youth trends. And anyway, doesn't every generation have a good old moan about how much better it was when they were growing up? Well, Rosie Kay has taken up the challenge – and she's persuasive:

Spending a few hours looking at online reels of young people in various states of protest, I have reached the uncomfortable conclusion that young people don’t have any arts or youth culture with which to express themselves, and that is why they are protesting. It’s all they’ve got.

Look around you and compare what is on offer compared to the 1980’s, the 90’s or even pre-pandemic. There is no arts culture for young people….

Culture for young people since post-war until very recently had a multitude of varieties and spaces where you could safely express your individuality, your tribe and your unique beliefs. There was music, which had its own fashion, there was the fashion world itself, the UK famed for its ‘street’ wear culture that was unique in Europe. Mods, rockers, punks, goths, new romantics, emo’s, ravers and chavs, Britain’s youth culture was something to be proud of. Entrepreneurial, unique and style conscious, some had a political point, all had a raison d’etre to express new forms of style and sound.

So what do they do now, these culture-bereft youngsters? They protest.

The protest movement has all the hallmarks of a youth culture. Check out the pink or blue hair, the mullets, the undercuts and the straggly bleach ends. Check out the nose rings and the piercings. Check out the slogan t-shirt, the baggy jeans (again) and the hi-vis jackets. But instead of music, a culture or a tribe, the protest culture has an ideology you subscribe to, opinions you hold as if only you are justly correct.

Studying ‘Just Stop Oil’ protests I see all the panache of an early 1980’s O-level drama course taught with the enthusiasm of the PE teacher. Awkward youths gambol towards the fine stone pillars of the establishment or landmark they seek to assault, clutching aerosol cannisters of orange spray paint, unfurl a banner of a pre-approved slogan with logo ™. The finale is gluing themselves to a painting or the floor and then sitting or standing together, reciting with all the depth and enthusiasm of the school swot at form assembly, a liturgy of wrongs humans are doing to the planet, which they alone can save us from with their performative amateaur-ville stagings of agitprop activism. Perhaps in a deliberate move to be un-screen savvy, which the rest of the youth treat Tik Tok and Insta as their private reality-style show, their pallor and deadpan delivery reminds me of all the sexiness of a Sunday school teenage jumble sale.

Ouch.

If young people have no creative outlet, no way to shine or fail or experiment in reality, with each other, with their minds and bodies in space and time together, then this is the appalling culture we are left with. Empty, performative, dopamine addicted little activists, smug in their superiority, but bereft of their own creative destiny.

Here's the catch. A sop to the gender lobby, no doubt – perhaps to "counterbalance" the puberty blocker ban – but it would be disastrous in practice. From the BBC's Key points in King's Speech at a glance:

• A draft Conversion Practices Bill will introduce new restrictions on "abusive" practices intended to change people's sexual orientation or gender identity.

It’s a therapy ban. Therapists who ask kids why they hate their bodies will be criminalised. https://t.co/aVvju7LAeA

— Kate Barker-Mawjee (@KateBMwriting) July 17, 2024

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It used to be California leading the way, bearing the light of progress – then the rest of the US, then us. Not any more. Well, let's hope not any more:

On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill (AB) 1995 into law. The so-called “Safety Act” is the first in America that prevents schools from adopting any policy that would require teachers and staff to inform parents when their child wants to be referred to and treated as a member of the opposite sex or as “non-binary”.

Schools in the state were already performing secret social transitions of students in large part because of guidance from the California Department of Education that advises schools to hide this information from parents. AB 1995 is an attempt to codify these practices, empowering gender activists against their local critics.

California’s schools are going to extreme lengths to maintain this secrecy from parents. The Golden State’s Roseville Unified School District, for example, has a gender policy that assigns parents a score between 1-10 depending on how “supportive” they are predicted to be of their child’s transgender identity. A low score presumably means that the parents aren’t to be trusted with that sacred knowledge. And, of course, parents have no due process right to contest or even be made aware of the score they are assigned.

Governor Newsom has acknowledged that parents have a right to review student records, but he conveniently didn’t mention that he meant only the official records. Lawyers advising districts such as Roseville instruct schools to create separate, unofficial records for the students with “gender identities” to avoid parental detection — even when the parents employ their legal rights to obtain their student’s records.

Progressive activists frame secret gender transition policies as a simple matter of protecting student privacy and, by extension, safety against “abusive” parents. But the argument about privacy only makes sense if one subscribes to the dubious philosophical anthropology of the “transgender child”. That is, only if one assumes that some kids simply “are” trans, rather than seeing transition as a coping mechanism for underlying mental health issues, neurocognitive challenges, social adjustment problems, internalised homophobia, or identity confusion. AB 1995’s framing of these struggles, as a matter of “authentic” personal identity to be kept from parents in the name of privacy, is pointless or worse.

Worse. Apart from the vital issue of parental rights, it's taking away the most important brake on a troubled child caught up in a dangerous social contagion. This is how cults work. This how grooming works. "Let's keep it ourselves, OK? Your parents might not understand." And it's the schools doing the grooming.

The SNP saga continues:

A former SNP activist who once tweeted how he wanted “beat the f**k” out of feminists has been jailed for six years for a series of sexual assaults. Cameron Downing, 24, preyed on six victims at locations across Scotland during a course of conduct which began when he was just 16-years-old.

The man who sent these tweets has just been sentenced to six years in jail for domestic abuse, & assaulting multiple women.

The sentencing remarks say that his risk profile is raised by his “hostility to women”.

The SNP made him an equalities officer AFTER he sent the tweets. pic.twitter.com/4tTRuwTFQz

— Helen Lewis (@helenlewis) July 17, 2024

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If only they'd had some way of knowing he was a violent misogynist before they hired him…rather than just a somewhat enthusiastic follower of the party line on gender.

We heard last week about the North Korean film club determined to fight the spread of ideologically impure films from South Korea by showing heroic old films about the “Fatherland Liberation War” (the Korean War), to inspire regime loyalty. Here's more Daily NK film news:

A propaganda film was recently shown in Kyongwon County, North Hamgyong Province, at the behest of the party and working-class organizations. However, most people fell asleep while watching the movie.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Daily NK source in North Hamgyong Province said Friday that the party committee of a mining company in Kyongwon County held the screening for workers at the mine’s cultural center late last month.

Meanwhile, the Socialist Women’s Union of Korea gathered its members at the Hamyon Workers’ District and the cultural center in the center of Kyongwon County for the screening.

The screening was of “Notes of a War Correspondent,” a 1982 film depicting the activities of the North Korean army during the Korean War. The film was praised in North Korea as a step forward in war film production.

However, because the movie is 40 years old and people have seen it so many times that they have memorized the script, very few people watched it attentively, the source said.

The source said it was “quite a sight as more people were sleeping than watching the movie, perhaps because they’ve seen it so many times. He added that while people had fallen asleep watching movies before, “this time you could count on one hand how many people were actually watching the movie.

Officials from the mining company’s party committee, which organized the screenings, seemed helpless to control the situation because it was dark and they could not identify all the sleeping people.

After the screening, viewers were forced to gather to discuss the movie.

“During the discussions, officials from the company’s party committee emphasized that people must sacrifice even their lives to carry out party orders and revolutionary tasks, just like the protagonists in the movie,” the source said. “After that, [the party officials] made everyone participate in the discussion and got them to pledge that they would unconditionally carry out the tasks assigned by the party, even if they had to sacrifice their lives, just like the protagonists in the movie.”

Some people, however, were negative about this demand for loyalty. One person asked who would take care of his children “if we sacrifice our lives to carry out revolutionary tasks. Well, I really hate to hear talk about giving up one’s life.

People were particularly unhappy with the film screenings in the workers’ district and at the downtown cultural center, which charged KPW 1,200 per person for admission.

“People said it was nonsense to charge money to see a movie that we even memorized the lines from, and now we’re being charged for political study sessions,” the source said.

It's a losing battle.

Another high-level North Korean defector – from Richard Lloyd Parry in the Times:

A senior North Korean diplomat based in Cuba has defected to South Korea because he could not bear the idea of his children “bowing” before Kim Jong-un’s young daughter.

Ri Il-gyu, 52, formerly a counsellor at the embassy in Havana, said that all North Koreans contemplated fleeing the country because Kim had “extinguished hope” among his people. He added that in person Kim looked unhealthily red, as if permanently flushed by alcohol.

Ri fled with his wife and children in November, but the news was confirmed by the South Koreans only on Tuesday after he gave an interview to a Seoul newspaper.

“Every North Korean thinks at least once about living in South Korea,” he told the conservative Chosun Ilbo. “Disillusionment with the North Korean regime and a bleak future led me to consider defection.”

He is the most senior figure known to have abandoned the regime since Thae Yong-ho, the deputy ambassador at North Korea’s embassy in London, defected in 2016.

From the Chosun Ilbo interview:

Ri Il-gyu, 52, a former elite counselor who worked at the North Korean Embassy in Cuba, said in an interview with the Chosun Ilbo on July 14, “Once the article is published, the North Korean authorities will attack me as human trash, just as they always do with defectors.” Despite this, he agreed to the interview because he felt that “exposing the horrific human rights abuses and reality in North Korea is the way to help the North Korean people.”…

How did you feel about the nuclear and missile tests?

“Initially, the announcement of successful nuclear and missile tests was met with a sense of pride. However, as people realized the immense financial resources being diverted to these programs, their support waned. Under the false pretense of preparing for a U.S. invasion, Kim Jong-un’s regime has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to nuclear and missile development. This expenditure has crippled the country’s economy and reduced 25 million people to modern-day slavery. Older citizens have remarked that ‘it wasn’t this hard during the Japanese occupation.’ They question the rationale behind defending such a harsh and impoverished system. In response to losing popular support, the regime is escalating its politics of fear.”…

What are your plans for the future?

“For people like us, it’s hard to live without believing in the possibility of reunification. We hope to return to our hometowns someday and seek forgiveness from our families. If reunification happens, I want to introduce advanced culture, science, and technology to North Korean society. When I was in North Korea, I thought I was worldly because I had traveled a lot, but after coming to South Korea, I realized how naive I was. I didn’t know anything about banking, finance, traffic regulations, or automated systems. President Yoon Suk-yeol said in his Memorial Day speech this year, ‘South Korea is now one of the brightest countries in the world, but North Korea behind the armistice line is the darkest land.’ He was absolutely right. I want to think about how we can bring light to that dark land.”

Well, good luck with that.

Significant, I think. From the Telegraph:

Companies can legally block trans women from taking jobs intended only for women, the equalities watchdog has ruled.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said that if an employer wanted to advertise for a woman-only job, that must only mean biological women or those who have received a gender-recognition certificate.

It would therefore be discriminatory to extend the definition of “woman” to men who self-identify as women.

Baroness Falkner, chairman of the EHRC, warned that her watchdog would take action against employers who breached the guidelines.

How about starting with Mridul Wadhwa, the man installed as head of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre in a position advertised as for women only?

“As Britain’s equality regulator, we have a duty to promote and uphold Britain’s equality laws,” she said. “Those publishing job adverts must be familiar with their obligations under equality law. They can feel confident that our updated guidance will help them to comply with the law.

“Employers should also be aware that the EHRC will take action to uphold the Equality Act. Where we are made aware of potential misapplication of Schedule 9 provisions, we will continue to assess and take action to resolve these on a case-by-case basis.”

The guidance was welcomed by women’s rights campaigners, including Nic Williams, director of Fair Play for Women, who said: “We welcome this new guidance that makes clear that men who self-identity as women are not female and should not be recruited as such.

Perhaps Baroness Falkner is getting this done and dusted before – as rumour as it – she's replaced by gender-friendly Harriet Harman.

At The Critic, Jo Bartosch on the BBC and its reporting priorities:

BBC audiences might be surprised to learn that the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is committed to upholding the ban on puberty blockers. That is because on the same day as the puberty blocker story broke, our national broadcaster instead ran an interview with Venus Wailer, a trans activist who performs drag in a provincial city.

Bizarrely, this is the second BBC puff piece on the same Bristol-based performer in the past few months alone. The article, which twangs on the heart strings with much the same effect as a Hallmark greeting card, describes Wailer as “developing a drag act to help mentor transgender youngsters.”

The 32-year-old man, who identifies as a woman, reflects: “It gives me hope for the future because [the children] get it and I just want to lead the way for them.” No alternative viewpoint was offered about the existence of “transgender youngsters”, nor of the dangers of affirming a child in a cross-sex or nonbinary delusion. Tellingly, Wailer himself recalls that at his school in Venezuela, “there were kids in my school who were very flamboyant and getting bullied,” presumably these proto gay boys will today simply opt out of manhood by identifying as girls.

Granted, it takes skill to lip sync and dispense sarcasm while wearing skyscraper heels. But expert analysis of paediatric policy isn’t part of the drag package. So why did the BBC not opt to probe a little more deeply with an article on Streeting’s policy announcement? Why, instead of covering a major and controversial policy pledge did editors distract readers by digitally dangling a man in sparkly clothes in front of their eyes?

To many, drag queens are a sneering parade of gay male misogyny; of what feminist scholar Sheila Jeffreys referred to as men who perform “woman face” in the same way as white people once “blacked up” for popular entertainment. Yet because Stonewall died for our sins (or something to that effect) drag has now been recast by the BBC as progressive, as fun for all the family.

And by now it seems clear that someone senior at the BBC has a thing for drag queens, or at the very least shares in bouffant wigs. It goes without saying that some of those paid from the licence fee will have children who identify as trans, making impartial coverage tough.

And some of those in high places in the Beeb have family connections with a company with a lucrative trans connection, as Graham Linehan showed a couple of weeks back. It's all part of the pattern of gender-friendly news they're only too happy to dish out to us poor licence-fee payers.