Politics and Culture
Worth a repeat:
Ever wondered what education UNRWA 🇺🇳 provides?
There you go 👇
"Stabbing Jews brings dignity to the Palestinians"
"We have to constantly stab them"
"I want to fight against Jews"
"They teach us that Jews are terrorists"
"I am ready to stab a Jew, and drive a car over them" pic.twitter.com/gYTVvtU80X— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) July 10, 2024
Questions to which the answer is, yes – of course, obviously, indubitably. .Jacob Heilbrunn in the Spectator – Is Joe Biden in denial? Him and most of the Democratic party.
No one has reason to be happier with the outcome of the press conference than Trump. An enfeebled Biden will remain in the race as the Democratic party lashes itself into a frenzy over whether he should or not remain its standard bearer. So far, Biden’s campaign has resembled the American Airlines Flight 590 out of Tampa, Florida, on Thursday which barely avoided a catastrophe after several tires exploded during takeoff. If Biden continues to pilot the Democratic party’s fortunes, it may never achieve liftoff and skid totally out of control.
In denial, and in de shit.
John Vachon, March 1943. "Baltimore, Maryland. Associated Transport trucking terminal. Truck loaded with explosives."
[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]
From the Daily NK – Hell on Earth: Disabled prisoners suffer in N. Korea’s brutal camps:
Disabled people in North Korea’s political prison camps are suffering severe human rights violations, enduring horrific working conditions and daily violence, a source inside the country recently told Daily NK.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the source told Daily NK last Thursday that “about 8% of the inmates in Susong Political Prison Camp [Camp 25 in Chongjin]” are disabled.
Susong Political Prison Camp had about 36,000 inmates, according to a Daily NK survey last year. According to the source, about 2,800 inmates in the camp may be disabled.
However, the source said that people who are not registered as disabled “are not included in this statistic,” indicating that the actual number of inmates suffering from disabilities is likely to be higher….
Prisoners with physical disabilities are not exempted from disciplinary work in political prison camps. They must perform the same disciplinary labor tasks as non-disabled prisoners.
A disabled prisoner recently died from beatings and other mistreatment he suffered because he was unable to perform his assigned work duties.
“In political prison camps, disabled inmates are subjected to violence, torture, abuse and humiliation,” the source said. “On June 6, a teenage prisoner with mental disabilities who had been in Camp 14 [in Kaechon, South Pyongan Province] for only a few years died from beatings because he could not do his work properly,” the source said.
“And on June 1, an inmate in his 50s with an acquired visual disability at Camp 18 [in Pukchang, South Pyongan Province] was beaten to death in the dining hall when he complained about the meager food he was given because he could not perform his work in either quantity or quality.”
He literally fucked around and found out. Should never have been in the women's prison in the first place of course. https://t.co/o75rBOMYlf
— Clive Simpson (@QueensSpeechUK) July 11, 2024
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He's serving a life sentence for murdering his parents, and then ended up in the women's prison after claiming he was trans – as you do if you live in Washington state.
Continuing with the trucking theme – here getting down to the nuts and bolts. John Vachon, March 1943. "Baltimore, Maryland. Associated Transport Company trucking terminal. Truck service shop."
[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]
It's not just Annaliese Dodds we have to worry about: Lisa Nandy is the new culture secretary. Joan Smith at UnHerd:
“The era of culture wars is over,” according to the new Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy. Speaking to staff at her department yesterday, she condemned “polarisation, division and isolation”, and promised to make culture more inclusive. Up and down the country, jaws dropped as one of Labour’s most divisive politicians reinvented herself as a benign figure who wouldn’t dream of stoking conflict.
“That is how I intend us to serve our country — celebrating and championing the diversity and rich inheritance of our communities and the people in them,” Nandy claimed. Does that include girls whose aspirations are being crushed by boys who insist on competing in female sports categories? Women who have lost jobs in arts organisations because they refuse to go along with nonsense about “gender identity”?
She didn’t say. But Nandy 2.0 would have to be a very different creature for any of us to be reassured. She is one of the most intransigent supporters of transgender ideology in the party’s senior ranks, once calling for women who disagreed with her to be expelled. She also insisted that male rapists who “identify” as women should be housed in women’s prisons. Last year, she said children as young as 13 who want to change gender should be “taken seriously”, ignoring evidence that most young people grow out of dysphoria.
Nandy’s use yesterday of the phrase “culture wars” signals an astounding lack of self-awareness. It’s a lazy sneer, trivialising justified concerns about the impact of identity politics on a wide range of issues, from prisons policy to sport. Anyone who uses it is taking a side in a conflict they dismiss as spurious, while pretending to be above such petty behaviour. And that exactly describes the position of the Cabinet minister currently responsible for culture, media and sport….
If ever there was a moment to stand up for free speech in publishing, theatre and the arts more generally, this is it. But we now have a culture secretary whose grasp of the serious issues facing her department resembles that of a self-righteous teenager.
More on Jean-Luc Mélenchon (previously), from French journalist Michel Gurfinkiel at the JC:
Some observers have described Mélenchon as a Corbyn on steroids. The editor of L’Express, the centrist weekly magazine, recently offered another comparison: Mélenchon is today what Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right agitator, used to be for about 20 years, from the early Eighties to the early Noughties.
Le Pen was 76 in 2002 when, having come in first in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, he was the only candidate facing Chirac in the second round; Mélenchon is now 72 and ambitions to come first or second in the next presidential election.
Le Pen liked to play the provocateur and make scandalous remarks; so does Mélenchon. Le Pen ruled his political party, the National Front as if it was his personal property; so, again, does Mélenchon within France Unbowed. Both men have been ready to be hard-nosed rulers, Le Pen as a second Marshall Pétain and Mélenchon as a new Robespierre. Both are incredibly powerful orators, with a command of both the literary and the popular French language.
The main difference is that Jean-Marie Le Pen opposed immigration and multiculturalism (while being in friendly terms with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein), and that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the contrary, welcomes it, no doubt for opportunistic reasons.
The French Muslim community grew by 1,100 per cent in less than 60 years, from one million in the early seventies to at least 7 million in 2024, thanks to much higher communal birth rates than the French national average, massive legal and illegal immigration from Arab countries, West Africa, Turkey and even the former USSR (500,000 souls a year), and conversions.
French Muslims are younger than the non-Muslim French, more assertive and more confident in the future. They are reshaping French politics solely through the impact of their demographic weight.
Two decades ago, Pascal Boniface, an academic specialising in international relations, advised the then pro-Israel Socialist Party to embrace the Palestinian cause in order to co-opt the growing Muslim vote. This is exactly what Mélenchon is doing now, in his brutal, devastating way.
French Muslims celebrate Hamas and charge Israel with genocide against the Gazan civilians? They vote almost solely on such Muslim interests (83 percent of them in the Euro-election on June 9, according to pollster Ifop)? The Palestinian flag has replaced the red flag and the French tricolour? So be it. And it pays. More than six Muslims out of ten support Mélenchon and his party.
There are echoes here, of course, in that many Muslim voters have abandoned the Labour Party to vote solely on the basis of Muslim grievances over Gaza. The problem in France does seem more serious though – both from the point of view of the increasingly separate and isolated Muslim communities out in the banlieus, and in the cynicism of politicians like Mélenchon. Corbyn, I think, isn't cynical or cunning to that extent – just irredeemably stupid, and capable only of mouthing out-dated student-politics banalities. Good enough for my fellow Islington North voters, alas, but thankfully not good enough for the current Labour government. The UK parallel to Mélenchon may be more George Galloway than Jeremy Corbyn.
France Unbowed’s strident “anti-Zionist” hysteria is thought to be related to the rampant exclusion of Jews from higher learning institutions (such as Sciences Po, the French equivalent of LSE), the “cancellation” of “Zionist” artists or intellectuals and a 1,000 per cent rise in anti-Jewish violence (from the beating of senior citizens or teenagers to the sordid rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in the name of Palestine).
"Mélenchon is a person who is a threat against the Jews," said Yonathan Arfi, the chairman of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (Crif) in a interview with The Jerusalem Post earlier this week.
The French Jews’ main fear so far is that as the leader of the New Popular Front, a leftwing coalition that won a plurality of seats in the new National Assembly on July 7, he will be asked to form the next cabinet or at least to support it.
Which is why so many French Jews are now thinking seriously about moving to Israel.
Right before the general election’s second round, Arfi joined Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia and two other communal leaders to warn French Jews against voting for France Unbowed or alternatively for the right-wing National Rally, the party that replaced the National Front more than a decade ago and whose leader is Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter.
However, many French Jews, including former Crif chairman Richard Prasquier or Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, the famous Nazi-hunters, don’t subscribe to such a parallel. They point to the National Rally’s transformation under Marine Le Pen into a law-abiding, democratic conservative party, that has repudiated antisemitism thoroughly (and expelled Jean-Marie in the process).
Moreover, the National Rally, who garnered 10.1 million votes on July 7, is currently the most pro-Israel party in France.
Even more awkwardly, discarding both Mélenchon and the younger Le Pen would mean voting and supporting President Emmanuel Macron. But French Jews wonder whether he is really a friend.
He shocked them last autumn, when he declined, unlike almost everybody in his cabinet, to take part in a march against anti-semitism. He shocked them again, one month ago, when he banned 74 Israeli firms from EuroSatory, France’s World Armament Fair. A move seen as BDS’ biggest victory so far in a democratic country.
Jo Bartosch in the Telegraph on Annaliese Dodds, our new women and equalities mnister:
Despite having given birth to two children, she has been reticent to explain what a woman is. When asked on Woman’s Hour in 2022 for her definition, Dodds replied that it depended on the context. Like Starmer – who has shifted from “transwomen are women” to “99.9 per cent of women don’t have a penis”, to a women is an “adult female” – for the new women and equalities minister, “context” seems to depend on the political winds. …
An optimist might say that Dodds is not ill-meaning, but simply naive. Yet that downplays the danger. For as we have seen time and again on this issue, naivety is too often a green light for activists to advance policies that endanger women’s hard-won rights. Weakness, or lack of clarity, becomes an enabler of harm.
The fact that Dodds is surrounded in Cabinet by MPs known to have adopted radical positions on this issue in the past is a worrying sign. While the new PM has tacked back towards the dry land of reality, other figures have shown a worrying lack of clarity or understanding of the debate. Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister no less, has said that women’s rights are not in conflict with trans rights. This would seem to ignore the many cases – from prisons to public toilets and sport – where this is untrue.
It also ignores the extent to which there is institutional resistance to attempts to resist extreme gender policies. As Suella Braverman reflected on Monday, despite 14 years in power, the Tories failed to stop the march of the “trans fanatics” across the Civil Service. Again, a lack of clarity at the top – or worse – will see this flourish.
Dodds might even be tempted to take advantage of the honeymoon period to rush through legislation to placate the gender lobby. Many of the new intake will have bought into the idea that this whole debate is a “culture war”, somehow manufactured by the Conservatives. The parliamentary freshers are unlikely to be as aware that pledges such as reform of the GRA will have huge, unpredictable ramifications.
Time will tell whether Dodds can withstand the pressure from trans lobby groups, civil servants and her own colleagues. But when it comes to the needs of 51 per cent of the population, our new women and equalities minister would do well to remember a slogan beloved of her party’s previous leader: policy should be made in the interests of the many, not the few.
Placating the gender lobby, or looking after the needs of 51% of the population? I'm not optimistic….
John Vachon, February 1943. "Truckers talking outside a diner on U.S. Highway 40 in Delaware."
[Photo: Sh0rpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]
Mick Hartley 