Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Looking down

    Some of the nominees for the 2024 Drone Photo Awards:

    Drone-bridge-brings-into-the-city_xu-zhang
    “Bridge brings into the city” by Xu Zhang (China)

    Drone-bucha-city-of-death_carol-guzy
    “BUCHA, CITY OF DEATH” by Carol Guzy (USA)

    Drone-cranberry-harvest_brad-weiner
    “Cranberry Harvest” by Brad Weiner (USA)

    Drone-shepherd-with-herd_ivo-danchev
    “Shepherd with herd” by Ivo Danchev (Bulgaria)

    Drone-stay-where-your-heat-smiles_silke-hullmann
    “Stay Where your Heat smiles” by Silke Hullmann (Germany)

    Drone-village-under-snow_h-seyin-karahan
    “Village under snow” by Hüseyin Karahan (Turkey)

  • The Islamic Jihad doctor

    Talking of doctors in Gaza…this from Médecins Sans Frontières:

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    But it turns out the nice doctor was a key figure in Islamic Jihad's rocket program:

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    In full:

    What MSF didn’t announce is that Al-Wadiya also served as a key terrorist in the Islamic Jihad's rocket program. He was a humanitarian and Jihadist. Here’s what the IDF knows:

    ⭕️ Fadi Al-Wadiya was involved in Islamic Jihad's manufacturing operations for over 15 years, where he was recognized as an expert in electronics and chemistry.
    ⭕️ The same year Al-Wadiya joined Doctors Without Borders (MSF), he attempted to leave the Gaza Strip for #Iran with two other terrorists, aiming to undergo training.
    ⭕️ Despite Doctors Without Borders portraying Al-Wadiya as a healer, he was a significant threat. This highlights how terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip exploit international aid organizations.

  • Deference to doctors

    An interesting insight from a war correspondent into the gullibility of western journalists reporting from Middle East war zones.

    Jonathan Foreman – The media need to stop treating medics in war zones as fonts of truth.

    In the spring of 2005, when I was covering the Iraq War for the New York Post, I accompanied a squad of US Army soldiers visiting a sizeable hospital on the edge of the Sadr City area of Baghdad. An Iraqi doctor spotted my ‘press’ vest and took me aside. A handsome man in his late thirties, he spoke good English. He put his hand into the pocket of his white coat and took out a shiny .50-calibre machine-gun round. ‘These Americans’, he half-whispered, ‘two days ago they attacked our hospital! It is a war crime. You must report it.’

    I might have photographed the heavy bullet and phoned home with my war-crime scoop, had I not been in the area two days earlier when the firefight he was referring to broke out. It had started when a joint US-Iraqi army patrol was fired upon from this very hospital. The ‘resistance’ had built firing positions in the hospital grounds, effectively using patients and staff as human shields and causing the hospital to lose much of its protected status under the laws of war. This genuine war crime was par for the course for all the Iraqi insurgent groups, both Sunni and Shia, as was the use of ‘Trojan ambulances’ to ferry fighters and explosives – a tactic also used by militants in Afghanistan and in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

    However, the doctor in Sadr City made no mention of this misuse of his hospital. He was blithely confident that I would believe his claims about the US troops and their alleged atrocities. After all, he had dealt with my kind before. As a general rule, British journalists abroad never doubt the word of a doctor.

    Indeed, from Yemen to Gaza, doctors are a preferred media source, believed without question. After all, they are university-educated professionals, wear Western-style clothes and usually speak English. I have seen British hacks, instinctively sceptical of anyone in a state-issued military uniform, become as credulous and undiscriminating as children when listening to a man or woman in a white coat wearing a concerned expression. They are seen as more credible, more worthy of trust than other people – a leftover, perhaps, from the class-ridden era in which a Brit who wanted a passport needed a signature from a doctor, lawyer or accountant.

    The relevance to Gaza is clear enough.

    The BBC and other mainstream news organisations seem only too happy to parrot the more outlandish casualty figures issued by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health and various accusations of Israeli war crimes made by unnamed ‘hospital staff’. The media also seem to rely on one medic in particular, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon whose social-media page is filled with posts sympathetic to Hamas’s 7 October attack. He has been quoted by every British outlet, from the Guardian to the Telegraph, as an impartial observer.

    Deference to doctors is perhaps the more charitable explanation for the false report by Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, in November 2023. He claimed that Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital had been ‘flattened’ by a deadly Israeli airstrike. But, as soon became clear, the hospital was very much still standing, no one had been killed and the explosion in its parking area was the result of a misfired Hamas missile. When the same hospital was later captured by the Israel Defence Forces, soldiers found scores of Kalashnikov assault rifles and RPG rocket launchers inside. Bowen then bizarrely suggested that such weapons are a normal sight in Middle Eastern hospitals.

    It's not just doctors and health care workers. Even given the well-known Hamas monopoly of news information in Gaza, western reporters seem primed to accept the word of whoever wants to tell them about the latest Israeli atrocity.

    Take the BBC's Lucy Williamson, for example. In December she breathlessly reported on the abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Eighteen-year-old Mohammed Nazzal, hands bandaged and surrounded by his family, described to her how Israeli guards beat him and broke bones in both hands. The fact that the Israel Prison Service had a video of the lad being released with no sign of injury did nothing to prompt our intrepid reporter to reconsider. Here they were, a family of brave Palestinians, testifying about their suffering at the hands of the Jews. Why would such simple, noble folk lie to her? Of course she believed them.

  • Gender ideology destroys everything it touches

    Graham Linehan at Spiked – Starmer’s slipperiness on trans is utterly inexcusable:

    As the Telegraph noted this week, Keir Starmer’s pledge to remove ‘gender ideology’ from schools is hollow, as he doesn’t understand what the term means. This the Labour leader has in common with many comfortable, middle-class men who only read the Guardian and get their news from the BBC. These men – and I was once among them – refuse to believe stories from ‘unclean’ sources. Thus, many people in this country are as clueless as Starmer is on the subject, though they at least have the excuse that they aren’t about to run the sixth-largest economy in the world…..

    Starmer has had many years now of not having to address the gender issue. As he got on with thinking about important stuff like how to pay for, say, infrastructure, he continued to inhale toxins from a radical ideology spread by his comfortable, middle-class spads, a younger crowd who probably themselves have a friend who blew their minds when he started wearing black lipstick to the pub. They too have been programmed with the copy-and-pasted responses they’ve learned on Twitter: ‘Trans rights are human rights’ (meaningless); ‘You have a gender-neutral toilet in your house’ (stupid); ‘Trans people have existed throughout history’ (untrue); ‘Clownfish can change sex’ (irrelevant as humans cannot).

    Google ‘Starmer cervix’ and watch that famous 2021 interview again. He doesn’t actually know why he thinks it’s ‘wrong’ to say that only women have a cervix. His advisers told him just that, and no more, because they don’t know either. Worse than that, Starmer does not understand the vulnerabilities of the working-class women who will be at the sharp end of his inattention, such as prisoners, rape victims, disabled women, nurses and artists.

    Gender ideology destroys everything it touches. It has tarnished the reputations of the NHS, the Guardian, the BBC, numerous celebrities and the UK’s publishing and theatre industries. Will Starmer only snap out of his trance when someone close to him is affected? Believe me, even toolmaking isn’t safe.

  • Ramblin’ Joe

    Oh dear.

    The Democrats wanted and needed a compelling performance from Joe Biden last night: a rebuttal to the concerns about his age and ability. Instead, his performance was disastrous. His voice was hoarse, he rambled, frequently lost his chain of thought and sometimes couldn’t even get to the end of his sentences. Donald Trump was composed (not usual for him) and was as sharp as Biden was weak. When Trump went into his traditional hyperbole, Biden was unable to answer. It was perhaps the worst performance from any Democratic candidate in the television age and will now lead to panicked questions as to whether he can still be the candidate….

    One exchange summed up the evening: when Biden was crashing mid-sentence, saying he’d make sure that ‘we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to deal with. The covid. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with… what if we finally beat. Medicare.’ No one had a clue what he meant. Recognising this gift, Trump replied: ‘He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death. He destroyed Medicare’. The split-screen format means facial expressions matter – and Biden often seemed to freeze, as he has recently done so often, when Trump was his loquacious self. “I don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said at one point. “I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

    If the Democrats don't ditch Biden soon, and find a candidate who isn't senile, then we're all in big trouble.

    Will Pavia in the Times:

    The debate had been billed as practically the most important since Abraham Lincoln took on Stephen Douglas in 1858, and if Lincoln and Douglas were still alive, and several centuries old, perhaps they would have sounded like this….

    This really was the debate between the two candidates for the presidency of the United States. It had the savour of an argument in a nursing home.

  • Predominantly an elite phenomenon

    Bret Stephens at the NYT (via Jerry Coyne): 

    The notable fact about the anti-Israel campus demonstrations is that they are predominantly an elite phenomenon. Yes, there have been protests at big state schools like the University of Nebraska, but they have generally been small, tame and — thanks to administrators prepared to enforce the rules — short-lived. It’s Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Penn, Harvard, Columbia and many of their peers that have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.

    Two questions: Why the top universities? And what should those on the other side of the demonstrations — Jewish students and alumni most of all — do about it?

    . . .How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

    They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack — hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity. They got them from professors who think academic freedom amounts to a license for political posturing, sometimes of a nakedly antisemitic sort. They got them from a cheap and easy revision of history that imagines Zionism is a form of colonialism (it’s decidedly the opposite), that colonialism is something only white people do, and that as students at American universities, they can cheaply atone for their sins as guilty beneficiaries of the settler-colonialism they claim to despise.

    They also got them from university administrators whose private sympathies often lie with the demonstrators, who imagine the anti-Israel protests as the moral heirs to the anti-apartheid protests and who struggle to grasp (if they even care) why so many Jewish students feel betrayed and besieged by the campus culture.

    . . . . But the real problem lies with some of the main convictions and currents of today’s academia: intersectionality, critical theory, post-colonialism, ethnic studies and other concepts that may not seem antisemitic on their face but tend to politicize classrooms and cast Jews as privileged and oppressive. If, as critical theorists argue, the world’s injustices stem from the shadowy agendas of the powerful and manipulative few against the virtuous masses, just which group is most likely to find itself villainized?

    The article is titled  “Should American Jews abandon elite universities?“, and the answer, basically, is yes. 

    Not even the most determined university president is going to clean out the rot — at least not without getting rid of the entrenched academic departments and tenured faculty members who support it. That could take decades. In the meantime, Jews have a history of parting company with institutions that mistreated them, like white-shoe law firms and commercial banks. In so many cases, they went on to create better institutions that operated on principles of intellectual merit and fair play — including many of the universities that have since stumbled.

    If you are an Ivy League megadonor wondering how to better spend the money you no longer want to give a Penn or a Columbia — or just a rising high school senior wondering where to apply — maybe it’s time to forgo the fading prestige of the old elite for the sake of something else, something new.

  • “Nothing is left of this country”

    A fine rant by Lebanese TV Host Dima Sadek: There is nothing left from Lebanon except for Hizbullah and its weapons. The Lebanese people are like the passengers of the hijacked airplanes on 9/11 heading for certain death. “We are being held hostage. We have been hijacked.”

    Lebanon now is like one of those insects taken over and turned into a zombie by parasitic wasps. Iran is just using Lebanon for its own purposes – to destroy Israel, basically – just as it uses Hamas in Gaza. It doesn't care what happens to Lebanon or its people, just as it doesn't care what happens to the people of Gaza.

    She perhaps over-emphasises the mighty military power of the EU, mind.

    And this: "Putin, who was the only one to save your axis in the Syrian war…"

    Save your arses, more like.

  • At the Kumsong Food Processing Plant

    How socialism works in North Korea: you pay to get the job:

    As more North Koreans seek jobs at food processing plants, where food rations and wages are guaranteed, the cost of bribes for those jobs is rising, Daily NK has learned.

    “Amid a boom in production at food processing factories, jobs at the factories are becoming increasingly popular and corruption in job placement is worsening,” a source in Pyongyang told Daily NK on Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

    According to the source, production at the Kumsong Food Processing Plant in Pyongyang’s Mangyongdae District has recovered from a slump during the pandemic, and positions at the plant are now one of the most sought-after jobs among North Koreans. The main reason is that the factory workers have a steady supply of food….

    “The Kumsong Food Processing Plant provides monthly rations of wheat and rice calculated for the size of the family, as well as side dishes during national holidays and the year-end review. Since all workers at the plant are guaranteed a monthly wage of KWP 300,000 to 400,000, as well as good benefits, everyone wants a job at the plant,” the source said.

    North Korean workers do not have the freedom to choose their own jobs, and positions and roles are generally assigned by the government. But it is very common for people to pay bribes and pull strings to get their preferred job.

    As benefits have recently improved at food processing plants in general, people are vying for the chance to bribe their way into the Kumsong Food Processing Plant, the source said.

    “Employees in the labor department at the Kumsong Food Processing Plant [which hires ordinary workers without college degrees] are blatantly squeezing would-be workers for money. Before the pandemic, the bribe for a job here was around USD 50, but now you can’t get in without handing over USD 150 – 200,” the source said.

    “Not only the regular labor department, but also the department in charge of hiring managers [with college degrees] is making money hand over fist. Anyone who wants to become a manager in the factory these days is expected to fork over USD 500 to the management recruitment department.”

  • Female testicular disorder

    Wow. Girls being prescibed testosterone because they have a "testicular disorder". Gender medicine at work:

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    The justification, no doubt, is that these girls are "really" boys born in the wrong body – the testicular disorder then being that they, um, don't have any.

  • Unevidenced bollocks

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