Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Israel needs its weapons to protect its people: Hamas needs its people to protect its weapons.

    This is almost a companion piece to the speech I posted yesterday from Monika Schwarz-Friesel – another powerful response from a German speaker to the extraordinary explosion of celebration in the West that greeted the Hamas pogrom of October 7th.

    An open letter from Nobel Prize winner Herta Muller:

    In most narratives about the war in Gaza, the war does not begin where it began. The war did not start in Gaza. The war began on October 7, exactly 50 years after Egypt and Syria invaded Israel. Palestinian Hamas terrorists committed an unimaginable massacre in Israel. They filmed themselves as heroes and celebrated their bloodbath. Their victory celebrations continued back home in Gaza, where the terrorists dragged severely abused hostages and presented them as spoils of war to the jubilant Palestinian population. This macabre jubilation extended all the way to Berlin. In the Neukölln district there was dancing on the streets and the Palestinian organization Samidoun distributed sweets. The internet was buzzing with happy comments.

    More than 1,200 people died in the massacre. After torture, mutilation and rape, 239 people were abducted. This massacre by Hamas is a total derailment from civilization. There is an archaic horror in this bloodlust that I no longer thought possible in this day and age. This massacre has the pattern of annihilation through pogroms, a pattern that the Jews have known for centuries. That is why the whole country has been traumatized, because the founding of the state of Israel was intended to protect against such pogroms. And until October 7, it was believed to be protected. Although Hamas has been sitting on the state of Israel’s neck since 1987. The Hamas founding charter clearly stated that the destruction of the Jews was the goal, and that “death for God is our noblest wish”.

    Even though there have been changes to this charter since then, it is clear that nothing has changed: the destruction of the Jews and the destruction of Israel remain the goal and desire of Hamas. This is exactly the same as in Iran. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the destruction of the Jews has also been state doctrine since its foundation, that is, since 1979….

    The mullahs’ and Hamas’ obsession with war is so dominant that – when it comes to the extermination of Jews – it even transcends the religious divide between Shiites and Sunnis. Everything else is subordinated to this obsession with war. The population is deliberately kept in poverty, while at the same time the wealth of the Hamas leadership is increasing immeasurably – in Qatar, Ismael Haniye is said to have billions at his disposal. And the contempt for humanity knows no bounds. For the population, there is almost nothing left except martyrdom. Military plus religion as a complete surveillance. There is literally no room for dissenting opinions within Palestinian politics in Gaza. Hamas has driven out all other political currents from the Gaza Strip with incredible brutality. After Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2007, Fatah members were thrown from a fifteen-storey building as a deterrent.

    This is how Hamas seized control of the entire Gaza Strip and established an unchallenged dictatorship. Unchallenged because no one who questions it lives long. Instead of a social network for the population, Hamas has built a network of tunnels under the feet of the Palestinians. Even under hospitals, schools and kindergartens financed by the international community. Gaza is a single military barracks, a deep state of anti-Semitism underground. Complete and yet invisible. In Iran, there is a saying: Israel needs its weapons to protect its people. And Hamas needs its people to protect its weapons.

    This saying is the shortest description of the dilemma that in Gaza you cannot separate the civilian from the military. And that applies not only to the buildings, but also to the personnel in the buildings. The Israeli army was forced into this trap in its response to October 7. Not lured, but forced. Forced to defend itself and to make itself guilty by destroying the infrastructure with all the civilian victims. And it is precisely this inevitability that Hamas wanted and is exploiting. Since then, it has been directing the news that goes out to the world. The sight of suffering disturbs us daily. But no war reporter can work independently in Gaza. Hamas controls the selection of images and orchestrates our feelings. Our feelings are their strongest weapon against Israel. And by selecting the images, it even manages to present itself as the sole defender of the Palestinians. This cynical calculation has paid off…

    I lived in a dictatorship for over thirty years [Romania – MH] And when I came to Western Europe, I could not imagine that democracy could ever be called into question in such a way. I thought that in a dictatorship, people are systematically brainwashed. And that in democracies, people learn to think for themselves because the individual counts. Unlike in a dictatorship, where independent thought is forbidden and the forced collective trains people. And where the individual is not a part of the collective, but an enemy. I am appalled that young people, students in the West, are so confused that they are no longer aware of their freedom. That they have apparently lost the ability to distinguish between democracy and dictatorship…

    But yes, read it all.

  • UN Women

    In the Times:

    UN Women has been criticised for saying that women’s rights activists were “falsely” trying to claim that transgender people pose a threat to single-sex spaces.

    The organisation, which has had advocates including the Duchess of Sussex, had made several statements about gender on Instagram for Pride month.

    It said there was an “anti-rights movement” which was seeking to “falsely portray the rights of LGBTQ+ people as competing with women’s rights”.

    UN Women added: “Some try to frame the human rights of transgender people as being at odds with women’s rights.

    “For instance, asserting that trans women pose a threat to the rights, spaces and safety of cisgender women.”

    UN Women is charged with working for gender equality and the empowerment of women.

    Ha! 

    Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at Sex Matters, said: “It’s a sad day when UN Women lectures women’s rights campaigners on the need to include men with transgender identities in our work.

    “Labelling the grassroots campaigners and groups who are defending women’s rights against a global tidal wave of gender-identity ideology as an ‘anti-rights movement’ is outrageous.

    “There is simply no way to defend the claim that trans rights don’t compete with women’s rights, so UN Women had to resort to conflating the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people with those of people who claim a gender identity in order to make its point.

    “UN Women’s claim that campaigners are ‘putting lives at risk’ has been refuted time and time again — this is dangerous and irresponsible propaganda.”

    UN Women faced criticism for its response to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, for failing to condemn alleged gender-based war crimes adequately.

    It also waited seven weeks before issuing any statement of condemnation of sexual violence.

    That's all you need to know really. Carrying on the proud UN tradition of being always and inevitably on the wrong side.

    Remember who UN Women picked as their UK Champion back in January? That parody of a woman Munroe Bergdorf –  fabulous decolletage, a load of slap, sexy dress, long hair, but, still, always….a man. 

    Also, as they told us last October: "Remember, trans lesbians are lesbians too. Let's uplift and honour EVERY expression of love and identity! Happy International #LesbianDay! "

  • “Humanity has learned nothing after Auschwitz”

    Well worth watching.

    Antisemitism researcher Monika Schwarz-Friesel speech on May 3, 2024 at the Austrian Parliament on the occasion of the 79th anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp. 

  • Kiosks

    The vanishing kiosks of Eastern Europe:

    In cities across formerly communist Central and Eastern Europe, a distinct type of small modernist architecture is slowly vanishing from the urban landscape. Soviet-era kiosks – tiny, modular booths that served everything from hot dogs to newspapers to currency exchange – were once a ubiquitous sight from Warsaw to Belgrade. However, many were abandoned or demolished after the fall of the Eastern Bloc in the 1990s.

    Now, the publishing team of Zupagrafika, aka photographer David Navarro and writer Martyna Sobe, have chronicled these fading kiosk structures in a striking new book, Kiosk: The Last Modernist Booths Across Central and Eastern Europe.

    Kiosk1

    Kiosk2

    Kiosk3

    Kiosk4

    Kiosk6

    Kiosk9

    Kiosk5

    Kiosk8

    Kiosk10
    [Images © Zupagrafika]

  • Red triangles

    Daniel Ben-Ami at Spiked – The chilling rise of the Hamas red triangle:

    Earlier this week, inverted red triangles were daubed on the New York home of Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum. Alongside the ominous symbols was a banner that stated: ‘Anne Pasternak / Brooklyn Museum / White Supremacist Zionist.’ Underneath, in a smaller red font, were the words, ‘funds genocide’. The homes of other Brooklyn Museum board members were also daubed with red triangles.

    This act of gross anti-Semitic intimidation – Pasternak herself is Jewish – appears to be a follow-up to last month’s large anti-Israel demonstration outside the Brooklyn Museum. Protesters demanded that the museum condemn the killing of Palestinians in Gaza, disclose its financial ties to Israel and start divesting from the Jewish State.

    When used by Hamas, the red triangle essentially denotes that someone is being targeted for execution. It first started using this symbol last November in propaganda videos produced in Gaza. In these, the red triangle was marked on Israeli soldiers or armoured vehicles about to be attacked. Since Hamas started promoting the symbol, it quickly began appearing throughout the Arab world, on everything from children’s comic strips to social-media memes. In the latter, it often appears over images of Israeli soldiers or the Star of David.

    Now this repulsive glorification of violence against Israeli targets has been adopted by anti-Israel protesters in the West. As the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil-rights group, has noted, students at the New School, Emerson College and New York University ‘have all advertised their [Gaza solidarity] encampments using inverted red-triangle imagery’.

    The echoes of the Thirties are clear, and deliberate.

  • Back in the closet

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  • Packard entrance

    Detroit ca. 1908. "Packard touring car and tented entrance to club or dwelling."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing]

  • ‘Nobody is coming to help us’

    A reminder of the forgotten women of Afghanistan, abandoned by the shameful withdrawal of US troops in 2021 and now left to suffer alone:

    Barred from school for 1,000 days, girls in Afghanistan face forced marriage, violence and isolation with no end in sight.

    Just over three years ago, Asma’s future contained many possibilities. Aged 15, she was at secondary school. After that lay the prospect of university and then onwards, striding forwards into the rest of her life.

    Like many Afghan girls, she understood that education was her route out of the isolation and repression that had constricted the lives of her mother and grandmother under the previous Taliban regime. She was part of a new generation of Afghan women who had the chance to build independent and economically autonomous lives.

    In May 2021, a few months before Taliban militants swept to power, Asma was in class when bombs began exploding outside her secondary school. She woke up in hospital to learn that 85 people, mostly other schoolgirls, had been killed. By the time she had started to recover, the Taliban were in charge and her chances of returning to school were over for good.

    It is now past 1,000 days since the Taliban declared schools only for boys, and an estimated 1.2 million teenage girls such as Asma were in effect banned from secondary schools in Afghanistan.

    What has happened to them since has been catastrophic: forced and early marriage, domestic violence, suicide, drug addiction and an eradication from all aspects of public life, with no end in sight.

    “We’ve now reached 1,000 days, but there is no end date to the horror of what is happening to teenage girls in Afghanistan,” says Heather Barr from Human Rights Watch. “What the Taliban have done is not put the dreams of all these girls on hold, they have obliterated them.”…

    A United Nations survey last December found that 76% of women and girls who responded classed their mental health as “bad” or “very bad”, reporting insomnia, depression, anxiety, loss of appetite and headaches as a result of their trauma.

    Almost one-fifth of girls and women also said they hadn’t met another woman outside their immediate family in the three preceding months. Another survey from the Afghan digital platform Bishnaw found that 8% of those who took part knew at least one woman or girl who had attempted to kill themselves since August 2021….

    Barr says the Taliban have taken away “girl’s social networks, their friends, the outside world”. “They can’t go to school, or to national parks, or beauty salons or the gym or, increasingly, outside the house at all without fear of intimidation. They’re taking away everything that makes them human,” she says.

    She says the international community cannot continue to ignore what is happening to teenage girls in Afghanistan.

    But they will. It's not an issue that seems to concern anyone. 

  • Labour campaigning

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  • Penguin demands

    From Patrick Harvie of the Scottish Greens. Possibly:

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