Mick Hartley

Letter to the Times from Maya Forstater:

Sir, I was disappointed that your detailed coverage (Jun 11) of the Liberal Democrats’ general election manifesto did not include any reference to the party’s major proposals relating to sex and gender. The Liberal Democrats’ pledge to introduce gender self-ID, so that anyone is allowed to “change sex” by simply stating that they are the opposite sex, is highly controversial.

The party also proposes to legally recognise non-binary identities (people who believe that they are neither man nor woman) within the Gender Recognition Act. This would ride roughshod over decades-old legal provisions to protect women’s rights, which are based on recognising that everyone is either male or female.

The Lib Dem proposals are based on the fringe ideological belief that being male or female comes down to feelings about what sex you would like to be rather than what kind of body you have — and they would be disastrous for women’s rights.

 

Andrew Fox on the hostage rescue – International media embarrasses itself daily over Gaza:

Hamas followed their usual media tactics after any prominent Israeli Defence Force (IDF) tactical success. They claimed an atrocity, supported by faked casualty videos, exaggerated casualty numbers and a call for retribution. The IDF were much quicker to the counterpunch this time than they have been for previous events, but once again, too slowly. As I wrote in my piece “A lesson from Gaza”, media operations need to be as concurrent as possible to kinetic operations, with the obvious proviso of the need to maintain operational security. A media cell needs to ask itself “What is the worst thing the enemy can accuse us of?”, be embedded in operations centres, and have prebuttal rounds in the air the moment friendly forces are regrouping.

The information battle went the same way as every other information engagement in this conflict. Hamas got their message out first and international media ran, unquestioningly, with that version of events. Initially it was funny: “How dare they kill us whilst rescuing the hostages we took?” And yet, as ever, international media took the bait and ran Hamas’ story with a straight face.

This time should have been different.

This time, Hamas’ claims were so demonstrably false that it should have been the moment international news media sat up and took notice of the extent to which they have been duped on a weekly basis since 7th October. Hamas were claiming 200 dead before even the last IDF helicopter was wheels up from the mission. Any credible war correspondent should have known that this level of body counting is impossible in such a short time. Yet seemingly, they did not.

The videos of injured Gazans in a hospital were clearly rushed by the Hamas PR teams: one “injured” boy’s head wound is plainly hastily-applied make up. In another video, an “injured” man lifts his head from a pool of “blood”, grins, and rolls away to drier ground. In a third video, a woman’s IV line sits quite obviously on her knuckle and not in a vein in her hand. Crass and patently fake, even by Pallywood’s standards. Any credible war journalist, or an analyst with the slightest medical knowledge, should have spotted this immediately. Yet seemingly, they did not.

Images and video from the scene of the alleged massacre also do not match Hamas’ story. If, as they allege, 200 people were killed and 400 wounded, one would expect the scene of the massacre to still show the signs of war the next day. It does not. Not a blood stain, not a scar of war of any magnitude: an ordinary street in Gaza with life carrying on as normal. Any decent journalist should know that the immediate aftermath of massacre sites comes with evidence of the massacre that took place there. Yet seemingly, they did not.

International media are duped, and duped, and duped again to the point where benefit of the doubt must be suspended and one must consider seriously whether this is malice over incompetence. From reporting unquestioningly Hamas’ 37,000+ dead statistics, which stand up to not the slightest of scrutiny; to sharing faked casualty videos; to quoting seriously the histrionic “genocide” claims that bear no reality in what is actually happening in Gaza: international media are now Hamas’ accomplices.

As I have written here, Hamas’ entire strategy is to degrade Israel’s international standing through media operations, to provoke international pressure to force the IDF to stop their operations in Gaza. There is now such a comprehensive and overwhelming body of evidence that Hamas lies, and lies, and lies, that even the most anti-Israel journalist ought to question their stance.

There is no other genocidal terror group in history who have commanded such credibility from the international media with such flimsy evidence to back up their position. There is only one conclusion: these journalists parroting Hamas’ lines to take are either grossly incompetent or actively malign.

Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism in Texas, has a new book, It's Debatable: Authentic Discussions About Tricky Topics, due out here in August. Chapter 5 is on ‘Defining Sex/Gender: Beyond Trans Ideology.’ Or it was. The book as published by Olive Branch Press omits that chapter, "because of their support for the goals of the transgender movement".

You can read the omitted chapter at Jensen's website. He seems happy enough with what he sees as a reasonable compromise. Well, he has to work with them. For the rest of us the irony bells are ringing loud: all Tricky Topics are up for authentic discussion – except for trans, where it's still no debate.

The state of publishing…

There's a movement in American and European universities to cut ties with Israeli institutions over the war in Gaza. Maarten Boudry in Quillette:

What arguments are there for such a boycott? An open letter at Ghent University signed by more than 1500 students and staff, including dozens of professors (mainly from the humanities), denounces the stark “contrast” between the treatment of Israel and that of Russia in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, when many Western universities cut all ties with Russian universities. According to the signatories, Israel is currently committing a “genocide” in Gaza, and they demand that any cooperation with Israeli universities be suspended “as long as the current war continues.”

However, the “contrast” in reactions to both conflicts is perfectly defensible. Ukraine was brutally invaded by Russia without any prior provocation or military threat, simply because Putin imagines that Ukraine is a “fictional” nation that has no right to exist. If thousands of Ukrainian fighters had committed a gruesome massacre on Russian soil in January 2022, methodically slaughtering 1,200 innocent men, women, and children and taking another 250 hostages, only then would there be any semblance of similarity between both conflicts (as with many open letters from pro-Palestinian protestors, the letter completely ignores the terrorist attack of 7 October). It should also be noted that almost all Russian universities pledged their unequivocal support of the invasion of Ukraine, in a statement released by the Russian Union of Rectors and signed by more than 300 academic institutions.

As for the genocide charge, we believe it is as obscene as it is baseless. The tragic death of civilians as an unwanted side-effect of legitimate military objectives is completely different from the deliberate and methodical killing of civilians. It is perfectly reasonable to criticise Israel’s current military strategies and to question the sufficiency of measures taken to prevent civilian casualties, but it is absurd to pretend that the IDF is pursuing the opposite goal. The only genocidal party in this conflict is Hamas, which in its founding charter fantasises about the killing of the last Jew on earth.

In any event, a call for an “immediate and permanent ceasefire” and a boycott “as long as the war continues,” as the open letter demands, entails that no form of warfare against Hamas is deemed acceptable, which amounts to a de facto denial of Israel’s right to self-defence under the international law of war. No country would tolerate a terrorist group like Hamas at its border, least of all after a pogrom like that of 7 October.

Israel has the right to eliminate Hamas’s military capacity in Gaza, but unfortunately this terrorist entity has been digging hundreds of kilometres of reinforced tunnels for over 17 years (but not a single shelter for its civilian population). Hamas also has a long history of using Palestinian civilians as human shields, and deliberately firing rockets from hospitals, schools, UN buildings, mosques, and in the vicinity of humanitarian zones. All these reprehensible tactics are mainly aimed at getting as many “martyrs” as possible in front of cameras, in order to manipulate Western political opinion and turn it against Israel. Judging by the sentiments prevalent on many college campuses, Hamas’s cynical strategy has been a resounding success.

Boudry is looking for signatures to his open letter against the boycott.

State-backed gender medicine, now, in the US – A Doctor Told the Truth. The Feds Showed Up at His Door:

Eithan Haim, 34, is at the beginning of his career as a surgeon. He and his wife are expecting their first child in the fall. And now he is facing a four-count federal felony indictment for blowing the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital, where he worked while a resident.

At TCH, he discovered the hospital was secretly continuing gender transition treatments on minors—including hormonal intervention on patients as young as 11 years old—after publicly declaring, in March of 2022, it would no longer provide such services.

The hospital unwillingly backed away from the treatments under pressure from the Texas governor and attorney general. But Haim found not only were the treatments continuing—the program appeared to be expanding. He recorded several online presentations by medical staff encouraging the transition of children—one social worker described how she deliberately did not make note of such treatment in the medical charts of patients to avoid leaving a paper trail. Haim told me, “They were talking publicly about how they were concealing what they were doing. You can’t take care of your patient without trust. For me as a doctor, to not do something about this was unconscionable.”…

Haim felt he had to act, but he knew the career risks of speaking out could be enormous. He contacted conservative journalist Christopher Rufo, who published an exposé without naming Haim. Before giving Rufo evidence that puberty blockers were still being surgically implanted in young patients, Haim made sure the patient’s names and other identifying information were redacted. This was both to protect patient privacy, and himself from violating the law known as HIPAA, which protects individual patient identities while also allowing various uses of medical information. The story Haim gave to Rufo was published May 16, 2023. The next day, the Texas legislature voted to ban the medical gender transition of minors.

Haim says there was no immediate aftermath: “Everything went quiet. I was anonymous and went on with my life.” Then June 23 of last year, the day Haim was to graduate from his residency, two federal agents from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed up at his house to have a little chat. Haim’s wife, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, a different division of the U.S. Attorney’s office than the one that has indicted her husband, advised him not to talk.

As Haim later wrote in City Journal, “Before leaving, they handed me a letter revealing that I was a ‘potential target’ of an investigation involving alleged violation of federal criminal law related to medical records.” Haim then went public about the threat facing him in an interview with Rufo. (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas did not respond to a request for comment.)

Haim was indicted last week, but, as of this writing, he and his attorneys do not yet know the precise nature of the charges. One of his lawyers, Mark Lytle, told me it’s very unusual to bring felony charges for an alleged HIPAA violation unless there is a significant underlying crime, such as a hospital clerk selling a celebrity’s medical records. He said the indictment of Haim seems politically motivated. “The government is entering into the town square on the culture wars and didn’t like what Eithan had to say,” said Lytle. “I think they are looking to make an example of him.” Haim is raising money for his legal fees through this GiveSendGo account.

Jake Wallis Simons in the JC – Hamas’s strategy relies on complicity of western media:

The disgrace of all this is that Hamas has never hidden its evil – in fact, it has revelled in it, videoed it and beamed it out to the world – and makes no secret of its strategy. The terror group has designed Gaza to create as many civilian casualties as possible in any Israeli attack. The entire population of the Strip could easily fit into the network of terror tunnels, as Londoners took refuge from the bombs in the Underground during the Blitz. But Hamas does not let them in. It has not built a single bomb shelter. Its strategy is not one of human shields so much as human sacrifice.

It is time to recognise that Hamas places its own people in harm’s way simply because it understands how the international media will respond, not to mention the United Nations, NGOs and the world’s progressives.

It knew that embedding the hostages in the narrow streets and higgledy-piggledy buildings of Nuseirat would mean that any Israeli rescue would end with the UN’s special rapporteur smearing the operation as “humanitarian camouflage”, in a tweet that was viewed five million times, and the EU’s foreign affairs chief condemning “another massacre of civilians”, gaining another 1.4 million views.

It knew that Sky News’s special correspondent Alex Crawford would highlight the “graphic pictures of what’s being called an ‘horrific massacre’”. It knew that such an operation would trigger intensified calls for a ceasefire, which would allow Hamas to survive….

The way in which Hamas orchestrates the suffering of its own people is a consequence of the response it knows the West will provide. Is it an exaggeration to say that the media has blood on its hands?

As I've said before, it's a strange war where the "attackers" do their best to minimise civilian casualties, while the "defenders" want to see as many dead as possible. 

Epitome of the patronising politician mouthing vacuous pieties when he's after your vote.

Keir Starmer has pledged to end the Tory culture wars if he becomes prime minister.

In an exclusive interview, the Labour leader told HuffPost UK that people are “exhausted” by the political battles over issues such as trans rights.

And he said he wanted to focus on “bringing people together” rather than creating further division….

Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch also announced last week that if they win the election, the Tories will amend the Equality Act to ensure that “sex in the law means biological sex and not new, redefined meanings of the word”. Starmer has been criticised in the past for shifting his own position on transgender rights.

However, the Labour leader said his government would look to bring an end to those controversies on day one.

He said: “I think people are exhausted by culture wars. My clear view is that the vast majority of the public in general in the UK are reasonable, tolerant people.

“Live and let live is a very British thing, and what culture wars do is force people into taking sides that they’re not instinctively inclined to do. And it’s exhausting because you’re constantly having a battle about this and a battle about that.

“That’s why I’ve said that politics needs to tread more lightly on people’s lives.”

Starmer added: “The Tories have got nowhere else to go but this divisive culture war area, and I do think that if we do win the election I do want it to be a reset moment for politics in a number of different ways.

“The most important thing to me personally is to restore politics to service, a sense that this we are here to serve the country, but also this sense of bringing people together.”

That's some fucking brass neck from the man who couldn't define a woman and thinks men can have a cervix, discovers he's on the wrong side of the debate, changes his mind, doesn't want to offend his trans-friendly supporters (of which there are many), and cold-shoulders Rosie Duffield the only Labour MP who's been consistently right and principled in these so-called "culture wars". Just forget about all that because, you know, I'm really a jolly nice person and I think really we're all jolly nice people, and let's pretend none of this ever happened. 

1/ It's the height of luxury to write off perfectly legitimate and fundamental policy concerns as a "culture war". Whether a child has their puberty blocked or Helen Webberley gives them a potentially fatal dose of testosterone is not a culture war. https://t.co/5w5Gu7dToj

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) June 11, 2024

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Thread:

3/ From where I'm sitting, it's not a "culture war" to have a society that openly denigrates homosexuals like when the former CEO of Stonewall called lesbians "sexual racists" or one where gay men are called "genital fetishists". It's just abusive.

4/ I add that people who stand up to Gay Conversion 2.0 at gender abattoirs, people who show the sort of guts sadly lacking in the Labour leadership such as Kemi Badenoch are not mere "culture warriors", they are taking gay rights concerns seriously.

5/ Puberty is a human right and it is a gay right. The Cass review is not a "culture war", it is a damning indictment of a society that drifted into medically correcting gays and sterilising the autistic because it was too scared to say no.

6/ It is not a "culture war" to give boys who will probably grow up to be gay men experimental drugs which are being linked to increased testicular cancer risk. It is not a culture war to want young girls to grow up not having mastectomies.

7/ It is not a "culture war" to object to this massive great hulking rapist [Isla Bryson] being placed in the female prison estate. It is basic bloody sanity. Women and sane people are not objecting to this out of enthusiasm for debate, we are objecting because this is mad.

8/ The Labour leadership's utterances show no appreciation of the fact that we are dealing with a conflict of rights/penetration of a malign ideological into the centres of power. The approach seems to be "ignore it and it will go away". Well. Do I have news for you.

9/ Trans activism simply does not go away. It is well funded, well connected, seriously influential and ensconced across multiple institutions public and private with supporters in blue chips and unions alike. It is not noted for its lack of ambition or extremity in demands.

10/ Equally, those of us who think chemically castrating gay boys or surgically correcting lesbians are not going anywhere either. These are not "Tory culture wars". The Tories, for their faults, ordered the Cass review and appreciate the law re biological sex.

11/ This "culture war", which in reality is a serious and sustained assault on women and homosexuals, came from the third sector from bodies more aligned with Labour values. So don't tell me this is something the right dreamed up, it didn't. Yes it should have done more.

12/ But there's a reason the ugly new chevron on the ghastly corrupted rainbow flag comes from the left. So don't think you can duck this one Sir Keir. Don't think either side on this is going to stop.

These issues are too important to written off breezily as some "culture war"

As I noted yesterday, the BBC is happy to place casualty figures supplied by Hamas as front-page news. The Beeb, of course, is far from alone in pushing a Hamas line: across western media it's generally the same story. And never more so than with the latest hostage rescue…

From Honest Reporting – Biased Coverage of Gaza Hostage Rescue Serves Hamas.

Media outlets went out of their way on Saturday (June 8) to make Israel’s heroic rescue of four Gaza hostages look tainted or even immoral, with a reframing that served Hamas’ strategy.

Instead of simply reporting the news — that Israeli hostages Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv had been rescued in a rare and complex operation in the heart of Gaza — media outlets chose to label it as one of the “bloodiest” raids of the war.

They used three tactics to achieve that goal, which effectively turned justice into injustice:

• Minimizing the achievement by using the term “freed” instead of “rescued” to describe the hostages
• Emphasizing the Palestinian death toll based on Hamas figures
• Whitewashing the terrorists’ use of civilians as human shields

The Washington Post, for instance, headlined with the number of Palestinians killed – "more than 200" – called the operation "one of the bloodiest raids of the war", and "brazen". 

The fact that the hostages were rescued alive is mentioned only in the second paragraph. And the word “Blitz” is casually thrown into the fifth paragraph, evoking comparisons to Nazi warfare.

But what’s hidden in plain sight is the complete whitewashing of Hamas’ strategy of using civilians as human shields. The article simply mentions that the hostages had been held in “buildings,” omitting the fact that they were kept in families’ homes in the crowded multi-story structures, amid the civilian population.

NPR‘s coverage has similar faults: The Palestinian death toll is used to frame the hostage rescue with descriptions like “the streets were…covered in blood,” and the sites of the hostage captivity are called “locations in Nuseirat in central Gaza” — which could mean anything from tunnels to military compounds.

Did the Washington Post or NPR journalists independently verify whether the blood in the streets belonged to terrorists or innocent civilians? Or is blood used here — as in ancient times — to demonize Jews?

Either way, their coverage whitewashes the terrorists.

Reuters, which also called the operation “one of the single bloodiest Israeli assaults of the eight-month-old war,” used another tactic while focusing on the Palestinian casualties.

One of its headlines used the vague term “freed,” which can be attributed to the goodwill of the terrorists, instead of the value-laden word “rescued” that may paint Hamas as bad.

The emphasis, across the board, was on Hamas-supplied casualty figures.

And a BBC anchorwoman expected the IDF to warn Gazans ahead of such a dangerous rescue operation:

You couldn't make this up. A raid dependent on the element of total surprise and a @BBCNews anchor asks whether the IDF should have warned Palestinians first.

Maybe Israeli special forces should've also politely knocked on the doors of the houses where the hostages were held? 🤦‍♂️ https://t.co/6XJ23MC6kq

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 9, 2024

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The underlying premise of such biased coverage is that Israelis should not fight for their lives because it comes at a cost. They should just sit back and let terrorists slaughter and kidnap their brethren because they run and hide among innocent people.

But media should stop ignoring the increasing evidence of Gazan civilian complicity with Hamas, as well as the fact that Hamas bears responsibility for putting the entire Gazan population in danger since its October 7th attack on the Jewish state.

On Saturday, Israeli special forces undertook a mission in an area that became a legitimate target by virtue of the presence of hostages. As Noa, Almog, Andrey, and Shlomi were rescued after eight months in captivity, Hamas terrorists fired RPGs at them from within the Nuseirat market area. IDF troops responded to save their lives and bring them home.

Any other way to frame it serves the terrorists.

Of possible relevance to that BBC anchorwoman, from the JC – Hamas terrorists holding hostages told to kill them if they think IDF is coming.

Sometimes it takes a young person with bravery and a moral compass to shame a society. Well done Akiva for standing tall and facing down the mob pic.twitter.com/nIYzTEwAn3

— Jake Wallis Simons (@JakeWSimons) June 10, 2024

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

From the Daily NK:

In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, the women serving life sentences in Kaechon Prison Camp had to focus on producing export goods such as knitwear, wigs and false eyelashes, even though they were suffering from hunger and illness.

The workshop of the prison camp urged the women inmates to use up all the materials they had received before North Korea closed the national border because of COVID-19. Even the women who were quarantined in the infirmary because of tuberculosis or malnutrition were forced to work.

Since the import of materials had been suspended for almost two years, the women in the Kaechon prison camp were no longer able to produce the export goods that had been their main form of punitive labor. Instead, they were subjected to brutal physical and mental torture.

Concluding that the female prisoners should not be left to their own devices, the prison administration made them get up at 6 AM every day to memorize the deeds of the North Korean leaders and the prison rules and regulations, and ordered them to perform various tasks such as cleaning the inside and outside of the prison buildings and cells, running laps in the yard, loading and unloading trucks and carrying water.

After the announcement of the end of COVID-19 measures in August 2022, Kaechon Prison Camp received permission from the Bureau of Corrections under the Ministry of Social Security to import the materials needed to resume the production of export goods. As a result, female prisoners had to work 16 hours a day, dividing their time between their cells and the workshop. Day and night, they worked endless shifts amid the whine of the machines, unable to stop even when their fingers became calloused, cracked, and oozed bloody pus.

Forced to endure punishingly long workdays in horrific conditions, the women’s health deteriorated, but Kaechon Prison Camp did not provide them with proper breaks or medical treatment because of their status as lifers.

Between early 2020 and August 2022, there were approximately 40 deaths among the 500 or so female inmates serving life sentences at the camp.

Life was bleak for the inmates, who faced the prospect of dragging their ailing bodies to work nonstop for the rest of their lives. On top of that, they had to work non-stop just to survive under a rigorous system of management and supervision that would throw them into solitary confinement for the most trivial of mistakes.

The prison administration only cared about the inmates’ production and flagrantly violated their human rights. They were denied the right to a decent life. The export goods produced in the camp were the grim fruits of those brutal human rights violations.

Even now, these knitted goods, wigs and false eyelashes are exported to China, where they are given final processing by one or two other companies and then posted on Internet platforms for sale around the world.

How many of these buyers realize that they are ordering the products of the blood, sweat, and tears of North Korean women serving life sentences and forced to work 16 hours straight in dank prison rooms filled with the hum of machines?

"Hell on earth" may be an overworked phrase – but yes….