Politics and Culture
A reminder of another war…
8-year-old Mykhailo waits in vain for his father come home from bombed supplies store in Kharkiv
Now he has to undergo DNA testing himself, as his father is likely among the victims.
Authorities fear they’ll have to sift through ashes to find remains and identify the deceased. pic.twitter.com/X0PVmpeJnm
— Tymofiy Mylovanov (@Mylovanov) May 26, 2024
Natan Sharansky in Tablet, on the crucial role universities have played, and are still playing, in the demonisation of Israel and the sudden explosion into the open since Oct 7th of naked antisemitism:
Twenty years ago, just after the second intifada, I went on a tour of American and Canadian campuses. Shaken by what I saw and heard, I told (then) Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that the major battle for the future of American Jewry will be fought on campuses. So disturbed was I by this visit, that I titled the article I wrote about it in the Hebrew press “a journey into occupied territory.”
The “occupiers” in my metaphor were the centers for Middle East studies that had sprouted like mushrooms in American universities to spread anti-Zionist propaganda. Their influence was palpable, not only in events they organized, but also in their effect on the Jewish students I met. While many expressed deep solidarity with Israel and support for its struggle against terror, a few young men and women told me that for them, as liberal Jews, it would be better if Israel didn’t exist. “Then,” they told me, “I won’t be perceived as responsible for such awful crimes.”
Such statements, which foreshadowed attempts by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace to dissociate themselves from Israel, didn’t concern me as much as yet another, and far more alarming, set of statements. People who wish to fully sever their association with Israel neither reflect nor sway the sentiments and opinions of the overwhelming majority of American Jews. No, the statements that concerned me and led me to speak of occupation and battlefields were the many variations I heard on one young woman’s quietly spoken and regretful admission that she would very much like to speak against divestment and other anti-Israel measures, but she couldn’t. Her professors won’t like it, she told me. It would harm her future career.
Dear Lord, I thought, when I first heard these words. We are not in the Moscow of my youth, where one’s career depended on pretending to buy the Soviet credo hook, line and sinker! Yet the more students I met, the more I heard of similar, stifling concerns. Having grown up in the Soviet Union, I knew very well how catching and pervasive self-censorship can become. No one will need to “occupy” the campuses physically if the Jewish students will carry out their own occupation themselves by growing too afraid to speak their own truths….
Of course America is a free country and not a totalitarian regime. However, it was impossible to miss the resemblance between the culture I encountered in the American academy 20 years ago and the Soviet worldview of my youth. Like the Communist party (following Marx), more and more people started dividing the world into oppressors (read: always bad, always in the wrong) and oppressed (read: always in the right), and claiming that whoever belonged to the first camp wasn’t worthy of the same rights, freedoms, and protections as the latter. Since Israel and successful “white” Jews elsewhere were a priori classified as oppressors, hating and indeed abusing them became less and less taboo.
In the past 20 years, the ideologues of this new antisemitism continued to pour their fervor into demonizing Israel, and to use every tool at their disposal to press the majority of American Jews who don’t believe their lies into becoming doublethinkers. They made it more and more difficult to get a public position in a student body for students who supported Israel or even visited it on a Birthright trip. They gaslighted Jewish students who spoke about their personal experiences of antisemitism by telling them that what they experienced was really “only” and “legitimate” anti-Zionism, putting them on the defensive for their so called “alarmism” and “rejection of legitimate criticism.” More and more Jewish students found that standing up for their beliefs marked them for discrimination and harassment. Jewish students found themselves unwilling doublethinkers in the very places that are supposed to be the bedrock and bastion of free society.
After Oct. 7, the campaign to vilify Israel and scare its potential supporters on campuses has exploded into the open. Explicit antisemitism became legitimate and accepted on many American campuses, as so-called “anti-Zionism” revealed itself to be a flimsy cover for unadorned antisemitism….
The occupation of the campuses, which 20 years ago was but a metaphor, has become a real movement with funding, leadership, and physical presence. Young Jews no longer face ostensible threats against their professional futures; they face daily threats against their physical safety and the core of their identities as Jews and as human beings.
Sharansky was inspired by the letter published at the beginning of the month from Jewish students at Columbia – Proud to be Jews, and proud to be Zionists – which he sees as a possible "turning point in the struggle for American Jewry’s future".
When I was a dissident in the USSR, my friends and I knew well that a revolution can only start when a critical mass of doublethinkers stops being afraid and crosses the line into open dissent. Only when the masses lose their fear and drop the mask of pretense, can they lead their society into a different future. It was true in the USSR, and it is true today: The ideological regime of antisemitism that has entrenched itself in America’s universities for decades will only collapse when enough Jews stop being afraid. It will only collapse if they stop unwillingly aiding it by hiding and self-censoring, and instead speak their truths openly and loudly.
Following on from the US students in Tablet on their campus experiences since Oct 7th, here are some testimonies from the UK collected by Eliana Silver in the JC:
Anonymous, University of Leeds:
“It began very shortly after October 7. The most notable incident was the ‘Free Palestine’ graffiti that appeared on the Hillel campus building. A friend of mine had a swastika projected on his car.
“The Jewish chaplain returning from IDF service was forced into hiding due to death threats made toward him and his family. I was told countless times that October 7 was justified.
“When a group of us set up a stall outside the uni with Israeli flags promoting Jewish identity, a pair of girls approached the stall and yanked the flag, scattering our equipment across the floor.
“More recently the words ‘Israel harvests Palestinian organs’ were written in chalk across the ground on campus, an obvious lie and libel against the world's only Jewish state. There are continuous calls for intifada revolution on campus.”
Anonymous, Goldsmiths, University of London:
“There are no safe spaces on campus. Even the cafés are occupied. One of the galleries was donated by a Jewish donor and they covered his name up.
“My supervisors have posted antisemitic tweets and when I mentioned that I felt unsafe, my supervisor brushed it off and told me to read the work of a US academic known for their strong anti-Israel views.
“There is no breathing room or escape. Only one narrative is acceptable.”
Anonymous, University of Exeter:
"It’s been very difficult. A member of staff said during a webinar that Israeli women weren’t raped on October 7 because they were inherently the oppressor so could not be a victim. I was also denied the right to write in our campus paper about October 7, despite pro-Palestinian pieces being on the front page every week.
“Me and other students were surrounded and harassed by hundreds of people at our stall on campus. They claimed we were responsible for their families dying and that we weren’t real Jews. The university took no action.”
Harry, University of Oxford:
“My great-uncles were tied to train tracks in Egypt before being expelled. Israel was their only sanctuary. My great-grandmother was born in Jerusalem. Yet there’s no room for narratives like these in Oxford. Rather, the myopic focus is on Israel as a uniquely European project.
“Even soon after October 7, I heard people say, ‘We only let them [Jews/Israelis] get away with it because of what happened during the war, meaning the Holocaust.’
“The mentality of the encampment is to sideline opposing views as mere political disagreements. For them, the allegation of genocide is enough for it to be real. For me, my lived experience of antisemitism is erased.”
The number of students unwilling to give their names tells its own story.
From the Times:
An Oxford University student has resigned as vice-president of her college committee, claiming that “Jewish people are not welcome on campus” after allegations of antisemitism.
Madeline Bryant, 20, quit St Hugh’s College’s JCR, a student committee, and said that the pro-Palestinian protest encampment at the university was part of a “growing tide of antisemitism” on campus….
Bryant, who is Jewish and from New Jersey, had put forward a motion on Saturday night condemning antisemitic incidents that have occurred at the university since the attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7.
However, she said that her motion was sidelined to a working group while a motion put forward by Oxford Action for Palestine demanding the university cut ties with Israel was approved for a vote.
On Monday night she sent an email to about 400 of the JCR members announcing her resignation.
The human sciences student wrote: “I have watched my peers at this university chant to ‘Globalise the Intifada’ — a call for violence against Jews — but I was not prepared for it to come to St Hugh’s College.
“It is clear to me that some of the students last night did not come in good faith. I will not serve a JCR that has treated me so cruelly. A JCR that laughed when I spoke. A JCR that refused to engage in productive debate and instead decided to shut down peace and progress.”…
This month Jewish professors and students at the university presented a dossier to the vice-chancellor with more than 70 allegations of antisemitism on campus in eight months.
Bryant told The Times: “Antisemitism has become very bad recently so I put forward a moderate motion calling for peace and a two-state solution.
“But I soon realised they were not interested in dialogue. People have targeted me and attacked me for being a Jew. I’ve received a hate message online. The people behind the camp claim it is a safe space for Jews, but that is not the case.
“There’s a big problem across the entire university. When I saw the protests going on in America I thought British students would be more reasonable, and engage in civil debate, but I was wrong.
“My ancestors fled this continent less than 100 years ago amid violence and my family were scared that I was coming back to Europe to study but I told them I would be OK.
“Sometimes I feel it was a mistake. The one thing I’ve taken from this is that Jews are not welcome on campus.”
Well that's depressing. No doubt we all hoped that "British students would be more reasonable", but no, the American example of progressive antisemitism has proved just too compelling.
Marjory Collins, February 1943. "New York, New York. Italian-American fruit stand at First Avenue and Tenth Street."
[Photo: Shorpy/Marjory Collins for the Office of War Information]
The same old grump seen here.
On Ru Paul's Drag Race:
For those who wonder what on earth they are looking at, this is a woman who has cut her breasts off and now identifies as a man. She's a "trans drag queen", ie pretends to be a man who pretends to be a woman. Here she's acting out her double mastectomy for entertainment purposes https://t.co/pFmLj1Or9F
— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) May 27, 2024
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Pink News is very excited:
During the most recent episode (24 May), Gottmik, who, in 2021, became the first trans man to compete on Drag Race, appeared with a look inspired by her top surgery.
Adding her own creative spin to the category of “A Tail and Two Titties”, the Arizona-born drag artist appeared on the runway with an Ariana-Grande-style ponytail, and glittering red threads covering her surgery scars.
A cast of her own arms was wrapped around her chest, with a scalpel in each hand, as though completing the medical procedure. She accessorised the look with a clear plastic bag holding two bloody balls, aka her breasts.
While Drag Race fans have praised the look as “one of the best runways in the history of the show”, the clip also made its way into the hands of furious right-wingers.
Because only right-wingers could possibly object to this tasteful celebration of double mastectomy.
But Gottmik has the last laugh.
Some social media users tried to misgender the drag star, using he/him pronouns after assuming Gottmik is a trans woman.
Considering the star is a trans man who only uses she/her pronouns while in drag, the haters unintentionally managed to affirm her gender in the process.
Responding on X/Twitter, Gottmik playfully wrote: “No one affirms my gender like the TERF community hating my art. Talk about crashing the cis tem. Lmaooo.”
Ha ha!
Women taking testosterone – it's not a good idea. From the Telegraph:
Transgender men are suffering from “postmenopausal” problems like incontinence in their 20s because of taking testosterone, a study has revealed.
Experts analysed 68 transgender men who were taking the cross-sex hormone to change their identity from female to male and found that 95 per cent had developed pelvic floor dysfunction.
The participants, who were as young as 18 and had an average age of 28, had bladder and bowel symptoms that medics would expect to see in a woman after the menopause.
Experts said the impact of the sex-changing drugs on bodily functions are under-researched and under-reported, with people “not being informed of the risks at gender clinics”.
Around 87 per cent of the participants had urinary symptoms such as incontinence, frequent toilet visits and bed-wetting, while 74 per cent had bowel issues including constipation or being unable to hold stools or wind in. Some 53 per cent suffered from sexual dysfunction….
Kate Barker, chief executive at the LGB Alliance, said the group had “consistently spoken out about the damage done by these experimental surgeries, the overwhelming majority of which are carried out on LGB [lesbian, gay and bisexual] people”.
“Our annual conference has heard testimony from detransitioners who live every day with the consequences of actions they took when they were very young – sometimes in their teens – including permanent sterilisation and loss of sexual function,” she said. “This has finally been officially confirmed by the Cass Review.”
You can't help wondering how many of these unfortunates were influenced by the likes of the Pop’n’Olly books, so freely distributed to primary schools.
A look at Kim Jong-un's new "anti-reunification policy", from Fyodor Tertitskiy of Seoul's Kookmin University at the Daily NK:
In January 2024, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made a major shift in state ideology. Since the division of the Korean peninsula in 1945, North Korea had always held the reunification of North and South as one of its core goals. However, Kim abandoned this goal and declared that reunification was unnecessary. The word “reunification” cannot even be used in North Korea anymore. The Pyongyang subway system’s Unification Station became simply “Station” when authorities removed the word “unification” from its name.
The Korean People’s Army (KPA), for its part, was founded to reunify the peninsula. North Korea’s late founder, Kim Il Sung, who dreamed of reunifying the peninsula by force, worked to create the army even before the country was declared a state. In 1950, the KPA attempted to reunify Korea by force when it invaded the South, but failed. The Korean War ended in an armistice in 1953, but Kim Il Sung did not give up his dream of reunifying the peninsula by force. Kim even asked China for help in starting a second Korean War in the 1960s, while the KPA continued its propaganda about a “future great war of reunification” through the reigns of Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un.
This year, however, marked the beginning of a new era in North Korea’s state ideology. Kim Jong Un’s anti-unification policy will bring about obvious changes in North Korea and the KPA….
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has not only recognized South Korea as a separate country, but has even declared it an “enemy nation.” Previously, North Korean propaganda referred only to Japan and the United States as “enemy nations.”…
North Korean propaganda erases the humanity of Americans and Japanese. I believe that documents depicting South Koreans as inhuman are likely to emerge sometime soon. While “rotten South Korea” was to be liberated in the past, “the enemy state, the ROK” must now be wiped out.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol won by the smallest margin in the country’s electoral history, 0.73%. The possibility of a progressive candidate winning the 2027 presidential election cannot be ruled out. If a leftist government comes to power in South Korea, will North Korea abandon its “anti-reunification” doctrine?
I don’t think so. Kim Jong Un’s two-nation narrative is not just an expression of dissatisfaction with the Yoon administration. The real aim of the doctrine is to prevent the reunification of the Korean Peninsula under the leadership of South Korea.
As I see it, Kim Il Sung's great dream of reunification was predicated on the belief – not unrealistic at the time – that North Korea would be the stronger partner, and reunification would just be a matter of the South submitting to the North. Some seventy years on, that vision is truly dead and buried. North Korea is an economic basket-case and cultural desert only surviving through its links with China and Russia, while South Korea has become an economic and cultural powerhouse. The only conceivable reunification would see the North subsumed into the South. Clearly that is something the Kim dynasty cannot allow. So…two enemy countries, and no reunification.
I may be wrong, but I think perhaps for the majority of South Koreans the dream of reunification has receded over the years anyway. Why bother? They're doing fine, and the costs of reunification would be absolutely horrendous – never mind that China would probably intervene before that could happen, should there be a threat to the Kim dynasty.
From the Times:
A group teaching nine-year-olds that some children may not feel like “a boy or a girl” is sending its books to every primary school in Gillian Keegan’s constituency to protest sex education reforms.
Pop‘n’Olly, an LGBT educational resource provider for children, parents and teachers, claimed the government guidance will have “devastating consequences” for pupils. Draft relationships and sex education (RSE) guidance, published last week, will include a ban on the proactive teaching of gender identity, warning that it is a “highly contested” area.
It comes after complaints from education campaigners that a wild west of private providers were taking workshops and handing inappropriate resources to schools. In response, Pop’n’Olly is donating 33 copies of one of its LGBT children’s books to all primary schools in Chichester, West Sussex, which is the education secretary’s constituency.
Pop’n’Olly are the very definition of an inappropriate resource.
The book, aimed at nine to 11-year-olds, said that children are “assigned” a sex at birth by a doctor and compared identity to a recipe for baking a cake. Olly Pike, chief executive of the company, said: “When the people in power won’t see LGBT+ people for who we are, it can make us feel helpless. However, we also have power and we can make a difference with our actions. We are delighted to donate our books to these primary schools ahead of Pride Month.”
Resources on Pop‘n’Olly’s website include a “scenarios” activity — which it said was aimed at upper Key Stage Two pupils aged nine to 11-years-old — featuring statements from cartoon children. One child’s statement said: “I don’t feel like I’m a boy or a girl, but people keep asking me which I am.”
Under each statement, pupils are asked if the scenario is OK and how they think the child feels. Another child, named Fabio, said: “I love painting my nails, but a few people make fun of me at school for doing it.” A third, named Donna, said: “I love my short hair and I like wearing boys’ clothes. I’m good at football so the boys are happy to play with me, but some of the girls keep talking about how I don’t fit in.”
These people are idiots…dangerous idiots. They've turned the problem on its head. When children find they don't fit the gender stereotypes, the solution is to challenge the stereotypes, not to mutilate the children to fit the stereotypes. Everyone kinew this a few years back.
For an in-depth look at Pop'n'Olly, see this Transgender Trend piece from a couple of years back:
Without spelling it out this is the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative, in which denying your sex is explained as being part of dress up, clothes and hairstyles. Children taught this harmful nonsense in primary school will take these ideas into secondary school and their experience of puberty, where the possibility of doing damage to their bodies and mental health increases vastly. It will be the girls who are most at risk of interpreting the normal angst of adolescence as being trans….
Pop’n’Olly materials are best described as adultification, an activity which normalises adult sexualities and niche ‘gender’ identities, and invites children to join in the discussion. Few schools are likely to say yes if an outside body offers to teach their seven-year-olds queer theory and about being transsexual. Yet this is what they will be doing if they use Pop’n’Olly resources or accept their free books.
Hadley Freeman in today's Sunday Times:
It is not very mature to communicate in internet memes, but when I try to describe the Democrats’ attitude to protecting women’s rights, all I come up with is that Simpsons clip of Sideshow Bob repeatedly stepping on rakes and smacking himself in the face. So severe is this rake face-smacking tendency that last week the Democrats managed to make Texas senator Ted Cruz — a misogynist of such proportions that he thinks abortion should be banned even if the woman has been a victim of rape or incest — look like America’s last great feminist.
On Wednesday, at a US Senate judiciary hearing, Cruz questioned Judge Sarah Netburn, whom President Biden has nominated to the US District Court. Netburn has a long record of dealing with complex cases but Cruz focused on one in particular: her recommendation in 2022 that the serial rapist William McClain be transferred to a women’s prison.
In 2015, when McClain was 51, after he was released from jail for raping two children and before being reincarcerated for sharing violent child pornography, he chose to identify as a woman. And off he went to a women’s prison, with Netburn’s blessing. When the Bureau of Prisons suggested this could be traumatising and dangerous to the female prisoners, the judge dismissed that concern as “overblown”.
“The other women in that prison … do they have the right not to have a 6ft 2in man who is a repeat, serial rapist put in as their cellmate?” thundered Cruz.
“I considered the facts presented to me and I reached a decision based on the law,” replied Netburn in a “computer says no” monotone. Given she referred to the convicted rapist as “she” during the hearing, her grasp on facts is perhaps a little shaky. The Democratic senator Mazie Hirono declared Netburn would be “a damn good judge”. Smack goes another rake….
Activist groups insist being transgender is analogous to being gay, and so the Democrats have parked all critical thinking and waved through rights for males who identify as women. American women are now in the absurd position where defending their rights — the right to not share a prison cell with a rapist, to not be pummelled by a large teenage boy in gym class — places them on the same side as the misogynistic Republicans.
Before any British readers laugh too loudly, our own shadow minister for international development, Lisa Nandy, said in 2020 that male rapists who transition should have the right to go to a women’s prison….
You’d think, logically, that these cold shafts of reality’s light would make the phantasm of gender ideology wither away. But logic does not apply here. The same week the ERCC [the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre] lost its employment tribunal, the shadow minister for women and equalities, Anneliese Dodds — no stranger to rakes — announced that Labour would make it easier for people to change gender. Because no problems have emerged from making it easy for people to change gender. Other than in the NHS, sport, schools, prisons, workplaces and everywhere else.
Gender ideologues try to dismiss feminists — who argue there are major biological differences between men and women — by describing them as “right-wing”. It is true most politicians on the right tend to understand the existence of biological sex. They also probably accept the existence of gravity. That so many on the left would — still! — rather jettison women’s rights than state the well-established obvious reflects badly only on them, and it has left a lot of women politically homeless, stuck between anti-abortion homophobes on one side and biology-denying, rapist-pandering cultists on the other.
So please, Democratic and Labour politicians, can you stop making the worst Republicans seem like the only grown-ups in the room, simply for knowing that two plus two does not equal a unicorn? Or have you smacked yourself with so many rakes you’ve given yourself a permanent concussion?
Mick Hartley 