Mick Hartley

That would be the North Korean people. Or more exactly the Kim dynasty, that keeps its population in a hell-hole of repression and human rights violations. So yes, not unlike the Palestinians under Hamas…

From MEMRI:

At the closing session of the People's Conference for Palestine on May 26, 2024 in Detroit, Nadya Tannous, the general-coordinator of the Palestinian Youth Movement said: "We will not be distracted by […] a tiny concession – because we want the whole thing. It would be a dishonor for our people to accept anything less than that." The crowd chanted that they will return to Safed, Jaffa, Acre, Haifa, the Galilee, Lod, and Ramle.

Ju-Hyun Park of Nodutol for Korean Community Development said that "the DPRK has never once recognized the Zionist tumor that goes by the name of Israel." Park, who uses the pronoun 'they,' added that PFLP founder George Habash received training in Pyongyang. Mohammed Nabulsi of the Palestinian Youth Movement said: "They tell us they want us to say democracy. We want to save our people. To hell with their democracy!" Manolo De Santos, the founder and executive-director of The People's Forum Participants, which purportedly has financial ties with the Chinese Communist Party, said: "We have to bring down this empire with one million cuts."

The conference was streamed live on BreakThrough News on YouTube. It is worth noting that the keynote speaker at the conference was Sana' Daqqa, widow of terrorist Walid Daqqa, who died from terminal illness while serving out a life sentence in an Israeli jail. Daqqa was part of a cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) comprised of Arab Israelis who kidnapped IDF soldier Moshe Tamam and murdered him. Other speakers at the conference were U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib, mayor of Dearborn Abdullah Hamoud, and PFLP member Wisam Rafidee.

Elliott Abrams in Fathom – American Jewish Anti-Zionist Diasporism: A Critique:

In some ways this is an old story. As soon as Zionism was invented, anti-Zionism was invented. It was mostly religious: the view that hastening the return to Zion was substituting human will for God’s, was indeed rebellion against God; God sent the Jews into exile and the messianic age would arrive when He decided. That view was largely destroyed by the Holocaust and the need for a refuge in the Jewish State. It lingers on in the views of the Satmar Hasidim and of Neturei Karta—whose positions on Israel are precisely what one now hears from the far Left. The Satmar Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum said in 2018 that ‘We have no part in Zionism. We have no part in their wars. We have no part in the State of Israel.’

Three weeks after the 7 October massacre, Neturei Karta spokesman Rabbi Yisroel David Weiss said ‘We are crying with the Palestinians.’ He went on: ‘Judaism and Zionism are as different from each other as the earth and the sky; they contradict each other … As devout Jews, we pray to God every day for the swift removal of the Zionist state of Israel, which has caused so much bloodshed among Palestinians and Jews. We pray to God for the speedy liberation of Palestine.’

Twenty years ago, as a White House official I met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in his residence in Amman, Jordan. He took me to his private office for a quiet talk, and that room was decorated with only two photographs. One was of Yasser Arafat. The other showed Abbas receiving an award from the rabbis leading Neturei Karta. Today we hear the same sort of language from the Left. We hear it, of course, in the eliminationist chants on college campuses: ‘From the river to the see, Palestine will be free.’ We hear it from ‘progressives’ like the author Naomi Klein, who is ‘Professor of Climate Justice’ at the University of British Columbia. Klein’s Passover message in the Guardian newspaper was that ‘We need an exodus from Zionism … too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again … that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.’

This is Diasporism—the view that the creation of the State of Israel, and the entire Zionist movement, was a ghastly mistake and that Jewish life is best led in exile. ‘Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm and it is time that we said clearly: it has always been leading us here,’ Klein wrote. It’s an important point: her objection is not to one policy or one leader; as she also wrote, ‘it’s not just Netanyahu, it’s the world he made and that made him – it’s Zionism.’ The only remedy is for Jews to separate from, as the Iranian regime calls it, the ‘Zionist entity.’

More than humanity in general, Jews in particular are born to suffer – so the anti-Zionist argument seems to go – and should function as permanent canaries in the coal mine, exemplifying and reminding the rest of us of the woes of this cruel world. Israel as a successful state just offends the Wandering Jew image.

In the deepest sense, the Leftist anti-Zionists are adopting the view of the Satmar and Neturei Karta: a Jewish State cannot exist until the Messianic Age arrives because the one we have, built by men and women, is not pure enough. As Andre Spokoiny rightly described their view, ‘By virtue of their powerlessness, Jews could become the conscience of the world, the ultimate parameter of the morality of a human society. By sustaining a romance with powerlessness, and an idealisation of the lack of agency that transforms tragedy into virtue, Jewish vulnerability in the Diaspora could be reimagined as the ultimate engine of Jewish moral and intellectual genius….’ The moral blindness inherent in this view is well depicted in this vignette Spokoiny recounted: ‘Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, synthesised better the bargain that Jews needed to make. During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kertész’s humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, ‘How does it feel for you to see a Star of David on a tank?’ ‘Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform,’ he answered.’

Worth a read.

As I noted yesterday, North Korea blamed the South for introducing Covid into the country. The way the whole wretched Covid saga played out was all about reinforcing Kim Jong-un's authority and increasing the North's isolation. The truth, or the people's health, didn't.figure:

In September 2021, a researcher at a bioengineering laboratory under the North Korean State Academy of Sciences in Pyongyang examined samples taken from a Pyongyang resident suspected of having COVID-19. By comparing the samples with information from an international research paper, the researcher discovered scientific grounds to confirm that the patient did indeed have COVID-19.

The researcher immediately reported the findings to his superiors. However, the North Korean authorities, who claimed that the country had not seen a single confirmed case of the infectious disease, believed that the researcher’s work was a flagrant defiance of the state’s anti-epidemic policy.

While the researcher deserved recognition for a research breakthrough, he was instead branded a traitor to the state and secretly executed that December. His family members disappeared without a trace around the same time….

The most important thing for the North Korean regime at the time was to strengthen Kim Jong Un’s political base under the guise of a successful campaign against the disease. That is why North Korea so vigorously claimed that Kim’s brilliant leadership had kept COVID-19 out of the North while the world was ravaged by the disease.

North Korea also instilled the idea that the extreme measures taken to control the disease, including closing the national border and cutting off all contact with the outside world, actually demonstrated the state’s prioritization of individual health and safety amid the global COVID-19 crisis.

North Korean authorities emphasized that citizens faced a fateful choice: they could either endanger their children by crossing the border for materials they could live without, or they could protect their children by enduring some hardship. According to regime propaganda, the only way to maintain North Korea’s status as a “COVID-zero” country was to place complete trust in Kim Jong Un and follow his lead.

The logic of public control in COVID-era North Korea, where the top priority was to highlight Kim’s leadership in the midst of the pandemic, was used to justify the hardships that North Koreans had to endure. Numerous people lost their lives in the process, including, as we have seen, the researcher who discovered the scientific basis for positively identifying a person infected with COVID-19.

One Pyongyang resident recalled the dark days of the pandemic as follows: “When the state claimed there were no cases of COVID-19, infected people couldn’t call their condition COVID-19 and had to suffer in silence. It would have been better to die than to go through this physical, mental and financial ordeal.”

Ironically, North Korea officially admitted that COVID-19 had entered the country in May 2022, just six months after the researcher was executed behind closed doors. Then, in July, North Korea claimed that the first place the cases had appeared was in the village of Ipo, in Mt. Kumgang County, Kangwon Province, on the border with South Korea, and linked the cases to a “strange object,” understood to be a propaganda pamphlet flown across the border by balloon. In effect, the North Korean authorities blamed the COVID-19 outbreak on South Korea and attempted to exploit the disease for their own political purposes.

Ideology trumps science. We've been seeing a lot of that.

Arthur Siegel, May 13, 1942. "Detroit, Michigan. Style show presented by Chrysler Girls' Club at Saks Fifth Avenue store and scenes at plant. Chrysler Corporation office workers (one powdering her chin) typing various forms."

[Photo: Shorpy/Arthur Siegel for the Office of War Information]

In that earliuer post this morning, with JK Rowling and Rhona Hotchkiis, I missed out on the third contribution, from Susan Dalgety. It's worth reading, as a clear example of the horrors unleashed on families with vulnerable children by the gender cult.

Esther is a broken-hearted parent. The mother of three girls, her family’s life has been dominated by gender identity for nearly five years. Her eldest, Lily, now 17, believes she is a man trapped in a woman’s body, having gone through a period of being non-binary. Her younger sister, Rachel, is 15. She has tried binding her breasts and taking testosterone supplements bought online, believing she can change her sex. Both have been affirmed by teachers at their secondary school, against their parents’ wishes, but in accordance with the Scottish government’s guidance issued to schools in 2021.

Esther, frustrated by years of trying to support her children as they struggle with their mental health, has a simple message for Nicola Sturgeon and her ministers who promoted gender identity in schools. “What were you thinking? Why would you impose an adult agenda on children? Don’t you realise what you have done?”

Esther and her husband, Chris, are exhausted by their family’s ordeal. In her cosy sitting room she recalls how pleased she and Chris had been when Lily first made friends. “She is on the autism spectrum and finds making friends difficult. She didn’t have any when she started secondary school. She spotted the rainbow flag at an open day at school — it was the flag that attracted her, she didn’t know what it meant. It was the Pride club and she was quickly signed up. She had found a ‘tribe’.”

Esther describes how Lily became obsessed by gender identity. “It was a non-stop discussion about gender and sexuality. At one point she talked about 96 different genders. She was looking for a reaction. We talked about it endlessly, at every family meal. And her younger sister became interested too. We tried to be as supportive as you can be as parents. They wanted flags, badges, all the paraphernalia, and we supported them. After all, what’s a badge? It is just a badge.”

Then came Covid and, like almost every teenager, Lily and her sister Rachel disappeared online. “At the start of lockdown, we did lots of things together as a family, like going for walks together. But it wasn’t a normal society and the girls started spending most of their time on their computers. We didn’t know that gender identity ideology was all over TikTok and YouTube, and of course the algorithms sucked them in deeper and deeper.”

Esther and Chris agreed to the school’s advice that the girls be known by their new names at school, having previously changed their pronouns at school without their parents’ knowledge. Esther explains: “The transgender guidance promotes the affirmation model, so we reluctantly went along with it.” Desperate, they sought help from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), only to find themselves reported to social workers for “unintentional emotional abuse” because they refused to affirm their daughter’s change of identity by using her chosen pronouns at home.

After a seven-month wait, social workers decided Esther and Chris had no case to answer, and suggested that the family be referred to CAMHS for support. “I laughed,” says Esther.

Five years after their oldest daughter started exploring her gender identity, Esther says she and her husband are now taking a “watchful waiting” approach. “We have spent time trying to reconnect with them to get our family unit back together … It is important to stay close. But they are thoroughly entrenched in the ideology they see online, which only presents a positive picture and none of the reality or risk.

“They are an idealistic generation; they don’t want to have a male–female divide. Anyone can be anything. As JK Rowling said in her tweet, ‘dress however you please …’ But this is different. By telling kids it is possible to change sex, it has confused everyone, and it is damaging. I see the whole world affirming my children — school, doctors, opticians, everywhere they go, all in the guise of ‘be kind’. It’s a dystopian nightmare. And if we speak out, as parents, we get lambasted or sent to social services. But everyone is affirming a delusion.”

Esther says her only hope now is time. “If we can keep them as far away as possible from testosterone and surgery as their brain matures, we hope by the time they reach the ‘magical’ age of 25, they will be comfortable in their bodies.”

A BBC report:

North Korea has dropped at least 260 balloons carrying rubbish in the South, prompting authorities to warn its residents to stay indoors.

South Korea's military also cautioned the public against touching the white balloons and the plastic bags attached to them because they contain "filthy waste and trash".

The balloons have been found in eight of nine provinces in South Korea and are now being analysed.

North and South Korea have both used balloons in their propaganda campaigns since the Korean War in the 1950s.

South Korea's military had earlier said it was investigating whether there were any North Korean propaganda leaflets in the balloons.

The recent incident comes days after North Korea said it would retaliate against the "frequent scattering of leaflets and other rubbish" in border areas by activists in the South.

"Mounds of wastepaper and filth will soon be scattered over the border areas and the interior of the ROK and it will directly experience how much effort is required to remove them," North Korea's vice-minister of defence Kim Kang Il said in a statement to state media on Sunday….

South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported that "some of the fallen balloons carried what appears to be faeces judging from its dark colour and odour".

There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

South Korea's military condemned the act as a "clear violation of international law".

"It seriously threatens the safety of our people. North Korea is entirely liable for what happens due to the balloons and we sternly warn North Korea to immediately stop this inhumane and crass action," the military said.

In addition to anti-Pyongyang propaganda, activists in South Korea have launched balloons carrying among other things, cash, banned media content, and even Choco Pies – a South Korean snack banned in the North.

Earlier this month, a South Korea-based activist group claimed it had sent 20 balloons carrying anti-Pyongyang leaflets and USB sticks containing Korean pop music and music videos across the border.

In the past North Korea has claimed that Covid arrived from the South by balloon, as well as many other impure alien things.

Here's Robert Garofalo, of Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago:

“I’ll turn to the child and be like, so yeah what gender identity do you have?”

Dr. Robert Garofalo of @LurieChildrens hospital proudly admits the horrible truth behind the process of transitioning children. pic.twitter.com/40s97I5TyI

— Mythinformed (@MythinformedMKE) May 27, 2024

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A thread by Dennis Noel Kavanagh:

1/ You can be a Doctor or you can be a gender shaman and Rober here chooses the latter. Shorn of his duty to establish Gillick competence or assess according to evidence his is a holy mission, to divine and channel sacred gender souls purely on the word of the chosen. https://t.co/DhJdAMNLBA

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) May 29, 2024

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Full thread:

2/ A gender shaman such as this never pauses to ask why so many autistic or gay youth are chosen because that is a matter of science and data and his mission is spiritual a revelatory in nature. His practice is not medicine, but the delivery of sacraments.

3/ Here the evil Robert delivers youth from is predominantly growing up gay because we know 80-90% of youth crossing the doors of these clinics are simply proto young gay men and lesbians. In gender growing up gay is the ultimate hardship to be cured.

4/ And so the west slides into an Iranian approach to gender non conformity. This is why Dr Bell at the Tavistock warned of homophobic parents seeking out transition for children and why Sonia Appleby and many others repeated the concern.

5/ This is the great lie of the rainbow. Despite the new corrupted rainbow everywhere and endless holidays and approaching month long gender Ramadan this is in fact a weak and pre liberation community where the young are medically corrected out of their sexuality.

6/ It’s simple really isn’t it. Take your worryingly mincing lad and the gender shamans will heterosexualise him so he passes as a straight girl. Passing in this area is not just about sex. Here it is about sexuality and those 80-90% figures.

7/ To do all this religious work one must ignore statistics, disregard the detransitioners and resisters, cancel the opposing gays and often simply refuse to collect data. This is necessary in a world where spiritual revelation replaces Gillick competence or medical curiosity

8/ But then this isn’t the practice of medicine. This is the spiritual work of the gender shaman. A man so possessed of virtue he broadcasts his special connection to the souls of the chosen and his sacred work achieving gender utopia.

9/ The “trans kid” is about the most dangerous concept gender has produced and no more dangerous is it than to gay people. Welcome to regress. It is now more dangerous to be born gay now than 20 years ago. Thanks to our gender shaman.

Helen Joyce in The Critic:

Of the aphorisms attributed to the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, none is more famous than that you should build a golden bridge over which your enemies can retreat. If they are backed into a corner, the idea goes, their only way out will be through you. But if running away is easy and tempting, winning may not require wading through rivers of blood.

For some who profess the trans neo-religion, the Cass Report, published in April, looks like a golden bridge. Distinguished paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass said nothing in it that critics of gender clinics’ reckless experimentation haven’t been saying for years. But she said it in a government-commissioned report and demonstrated the near-total lack of an evidence base.

Just two of 103 academic papers that fit the criteria for inclusion in the literature review were judged to be high quality, and the rest were either worthless or inconclusive. An awful lot of people who spent years insisting not just that gender-confused kids should be chemically castrated with puberty blockers and speedily prescribed cross-sex hormones, but also that women can have penises and all the other trans articles of faith, are now looking for a face-saving way to recant.

Amongst them is Keir Starmer. In 2021 the Labour leader said backbencher Rosie Duffield was wrong to say that only women have a cervix; post-Cass he admits that “biologically, she of course is right”. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, who used to say “trans women are women, get over it”, now says the next Labour government will “work to implement the expert recommendations of the Cass review”.

Why did two clever men ever believe that men could become women? Or that little children could discern their innate gender identities before they could tie their shoelaces?

Streeting, like so many gay men, was presumably misled by some gay campaign groups’ adoption of trans ideology despite its incompatibility with gay people’s rights. As for Sir Keir, he’s a lawyer, and lawyers are prone to believing that laws can overwrite reality.

His insistence pre-Cass that “99.9 per cent” of women don’t have penises makes sense if you think a government-issued piece of paper determines your sex (the 0.1 per cent are men with gender recognition certificates stating their “acquired gender” as female).

Funny how many people fell for this when they have no trouble understanding the concept of a “legal fiction” when the government declares Rwanda safe.

Streeting surely understands that the more that is done to end the scandal of sterilising gender-confused children before he picks up the health portfolio, the better for him. Sir Keir no doubt wants to avoid questions about women’s penises at every press conference he gives as prime minister. As John Maynard Keynes nearly said, when the incentives change, I change my mind.

The hope now is that many of the cowards who remained professionally deaf and blind to the downsides of pretending sex can change, join the rush for the exit. The self-proclaimed sceptics who used to be so scathing about homoeopathy but swallowed the ludicrous claim that it was possible to be “born in the wrong body”. The New Atheists who genuflected to a godless neo-religion. The civil servants supposed to uphold impartiality in public life, who put their pronouns in their email signatures….

In the Times today, an extract from JK Rowling's essay in The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, due out tomorrow:

Looking back now, and notwithstanding how unpleasant it’s been at times, I see that outing myself as gender-critical brought far more positives than negatives. The most important benefit of speaking out was that I was free to act.

One of my favourite writers, Colette, wrote in her book My Apprenticeships, “among all the forms of absurd courage, the courage of girls is outstanding.” For too long, I’d watched in silence as girls and women with everything to lose had stood up in the face of a modern-day witch hunt, braving threats and intimidation, not only from activists in black balaclavas holding placards promising to beat and murder them, but from institutions and employers telling them they must accept and espouse an ideology in which they don’t believe, and surrender their rights. In a sense, of course, all courage is absurd. Humans are hardwired to survive, to seek safety and comfort. Isn’t it more sensible to keep your head down, to hope somebody else sorts it out, to serve our self-interest, to court approval? Possibly.

But I believe that what is being done to troubled young people in the name of gender identity ideology is, indeed, a terrible medical scandal. I believe we’re witnessing the greatest assault of my lifetime on the rights our foremothers thought they’d guaranteed for all women. Ultimately, I spoke up because I’d have felt ashamed for the rest of my days if I hadn’t. If I feel any regret at all, it’s that I didn’t speak far sooner.

And this, from former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss, on why trans-identified males have no place in all-women prisons:

In 2014, I fulfilled what had been an ambition since joining the prison service five years previously and moved to HMP Cornton Vale — Scotland’s only all-women prison — as governor in charge.

In my two years there, I encountered several trans-identified male prisoners and became implacably convinced that they should not be in a women’s jail. I listened to all the arguments: they are women; they live as women; they are particularly vulnerable. But not one of those claims stood up to close examination. Trans-identified males pose the same challenges to women as all men — everyone knows what those are and that’s why men as a group are not permitted unfettered access to women’s spaces, services and sports. Trans-identified males are not excluded from these spaces because they are trans but because they are male, and that should hold as true for prisons.

I wish people would remember that women in jails have no choice: they cannot get away. They cannot avoid sharing intimate spaces. They cannot “reframe their trauma”, as one prominent Scottish activist outrageously suggested to rape survivors uncomfortable with males in single-sex spaces.

Women prisoners must live in close, sometimes very close, proximity to whoever the prison service decides. They must say nothing while a man with an erection, visible through his tight leggings, enjoys their obvious discomfort. They must say nothing while an aggressive man punches walls, triggering adrenaline rushes of fear as women relive the male violence and abuse that they have suffered in the past. They must say nothing while a man, masquerading as a woman, describes in detail what he plans to do to his girlfriend with his penis when he gets out. And they must remain silent when a “trans woman” tells them he has no intention of living as a woman in the community.

These all too common incidents, all ones I have witnessed or had reported to me, are compounded by the fact that in the UK, but not only the UK, a disproportionately high number of trans-identified males in prison are convicted sex offenders….

Update: amended, as The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht is not just a Rowling book – it's a collection of essays, with JKR being one of the contributors.

It's Scotland. Again:

More than 95 per cent of Scottish secondary schools are telling children they can self-identify their gender, an investigation has found.

In a report, For Women Scotland, the campaign group, claimed that an “unscientific contested belief system” had become “deeply embedded” within classrooms as a result of controversial SNP government guidance and the influence of radical activist groups.

In findings based on freedom of information requests from hundreds of schools, the group discovered nine in 10 Scottish secondaries taught pupils that humans have a gender identity that may be different to their biological sex.

At least 95.4 per cent are operating gender self-ID policies, meaning schools consider the gender of the child to be whatever they declare it to be.

The situation means that biological males are being allowed to participate in female sport classes and share toilets and changing rooms with girls in a majority of high schools, the report warns.

The SNP government has kept controversial guidance, which calls on teachers to “be affirming” to children who say they are trans and endorses “social transition”, in place despite the recent findings of the Cass review.

The Celtic fringe, eh.