Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • “We wanted to show that Israeli art, pride and spirit cannot be stopped”

    The JC on last night in East Finchley:

    The Jewish community reclaimed the streets tonight as over 2,000 people demonstrated outside the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley north-west London to show solidarity with its decision to screen an Israeli documentary about the October 7 terrorist attacks.

    In the past week, there had been a widely publicised demonstration organised by anti-Israel activists to protest against the screening of “Supernova”, about the massacre by Hamas of 360 people at the Supernova music festival.

    Last night, protesters graffitied “Say no to artwashing” on the front of the iconic cinema. This afternoon, film-makers Ken Loach and Mike Leigh stepped down from their roles as patrons of the Phoenix in protest against the cinema showing films from Seret, the festival of Israeli cinema, which was hosting tonight’s screening of “Supernova”, together with UJIA.

    Yesterday I wondered what moral sewer  these protestors were swimming in. No surprise that Ken Loach jumped in. Mike Leigh – maybe less expected. They may claim it was the Israel link rather than this specific documentary. Still…shameful.

    The pro-Israel crowd, which stretched down East Finchley High Rd, had anticipated a much larger protest from anti-Israel activists. But, in the end, the anti-Israel group, which numbered around 50 people, was dwarfed by the Israel supporters, who waved huge Israeli flags, held posters calling for the return of the hostages and did Israeli dancing in the street as traffic came to a stand-still.

    One pro-Israel supporter told the JC she was at the rally “because as a daughter of a refugee, I am in disbelief that [the protest against the screening] is happening. Everybody should be able to see that what happened on October 7 was the most terrible massacre, rape, kidnap – what’s in their mind to be protesting this? It’s just hatred.”

    Exactly.

    An Israeli demonstrator said she had decided to come “to stand for Israel and to stamp out this horrible situation that will not allow us to say our thoughts and feelings without people protesting or damaging a cinema because it wants to show the truth.

    “Those people don’t know what it’s like to live in the middle of Israel, to try to live with the conflict, to have to run with your kids to the shelter.The first thing my son asked when we moved to London two years ago was: ‘Mum, where can we find the shelter?’”…

    Pro-Israel supporters, some of whom admitted to having felt apprehensive about attending the rally, said they left feeling jubilant. One lady said: “I feel an immense sense of connection and pride. I can’t believe the feeling of unity. I’ve been to a few protests, but this one tops them all.”

    Another told the JC: “I never imagined I would be dancing to Moshiah in the middle of East Finchley High Road, waving an Israeli flag. It’s unprecedented.”

    One of the organisers, Orit Eyal-Fibeesh, said afterwards: “We wanted to show that Israeli art, pride and spirit cannot be stopped.”

    “We think that the world needs to know and needs to see [what happened on October 7]. They can’t hide any longer behind the atrocities they’ve committed. For the few of the hostages that are still live, we owe it to them to continue to fight and continue to show that Israel is not the evil in all of this.”

    Asked how many people she had expected to come to support the film screening, Eyal-Fibeesh said: “We realised that people were eager to show up, but we didn’t realise how many people would come. There are people from across the community – left-wing right-wing, religious, non-religious. There is a wide consensus that Israel is alive and Israel is here to stay.

    “We have our place – even in this country. We don’t want to hide. We will never hide. We will hold our heads high.”

  • Talking to clever idiots

    "What makes males a greater risk?" Gosh. Kathleen Stock puts up with it in America:

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  • The goal of the oppressed is liberation, but the goal of fundamentalists is domination

    A new video has been released by the parents of female Israeli soldiers kidnapped from a military base during the October 7 attack by Hamas, as a “last resort” to pressure the Israeli government to negotiate a hostage deal. It shows the women, handcuffed and terrified, being abused by their kidnappers.


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    When in history has there been a slave uprising where older men—indoctrinated with jihadist ideologies of global domination/proliferation of political Islam and bankrolled by billionaires—took 19 year old girls captive as sex slaves? Never.

    Why? Because the goal of the oppressed is liberation, but the goal of fundamentalists is domination.

    Why are these exclusively women that they’re proudly parading around as captives for the world to see? Why do they want everybody to know what they did? Because sexual violence is a war tactic intentionally committed to subjugate, humiliate, embarrass, instill fear in, and dominate a population. It is psychological warfare.

    That is not the language of the oppressed. That is the language of the oppressor.

    If, as a society, we cannot draw the line at sexual violence against young girls committed for the purpose of psychological warfare, then as a society we have no lines at all, no values, no morals, and are vulnerable to corruption and collapse.

    The line of moral clarity is so clear here, I am begging you to climb out of the fog of indoctrination and see it.

  • In East Finchley

    The short documentary film Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre, is showing tonight at The Phoenix in East Finchley:

    This devastating massacre shocked the world with its extremely graphically violent images. The horrific scenes of hundreds of Hamas terrorists breaking through the border, fully armed, riding ISIS-like pickup trucks and motorcycles through the desert and in the streets, slaughtering, burning, raping, and kidnapping free-minded young people who came to celebrate life.

    This film provides a retrospective of 24 hours at the Nova festival in Re'im through the lens of young individuals who endured the horror. The initial filming began 48 hours after the catastrophic incident, during which we documented eight partygoers. The narrative unfolds chronologically, weaving together their firsthand accounts to construct a record of the events.

    From the JC:

    London’s oldest cinema has been targeted by anti-Israel protesters ahead of a private screening of a documentary on the October 7 massacre at the Supernova music festival.

    “Say no to artwashing” in large red lettering was found graffitied across the front of the much-loved Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley, north London, this morning. The iconic signage had also been splattered with red paint….

    Odelia Haroush, one of the founders and the CEO of the Seret Israeli film festival, which is hosting tonight’s screening of “Supernova”, told the JC: “What they have written is awful, and it’s so not true. On the contrary to artwashing, we are showing what really happened on October 7. We are showing a documentary film. The world should know about the horrors.

    Haroush added: “I’m totally against cancelling culture. If the other side has something to say, they can make a film and screen it.”…

    Campaign Against Antisemitism posted on Twitter: “Ahead of a screening of a documentary about Hamas’ barbaric attack on the Nova music festival on 7th October, in which over 360 people were killed, the @PhoenixCinema has been defaced.

    "The historic Cinema resides in Finchley, an area of London home to a large Jewish community. This vandalism must be investigated immediately as a matter of urgency, @MetPoliceUK”

    Sarah Sackman, Labour candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, wrote on X/Twitter: “I’m not going to dignify the criminals who did this damage by reposting the image of their disgusting action. This community cinema in a diverse neighbourhood is screening a documentary about the 7 October pogrom. The cinema should screen it.”

    A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said that the graffiti was being investigated “as a potential hate crime”, but that no arrests had been made.

    Protests and counter-protests are expected to take place outside the cinema before this evening’s screening. The Met spokeserson said that officers would be there “to make sure those attending can protest safely whilst at the same time minimising serious disruption to the community”.

    What possible justification can there be for violently protesting a documentary film like this? What antisemitic moral sewer do these people swim in? 

    A petition at Change.org. – Stop the Planned Protests in Finchley and Protect the Jewish Community.

    Update:

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  • Inducing iatrogenic disease

    From Gender Clinic News:

    The safety of an unknown number of teenage girls given testosterone by Australian gender clinics is in question following an extraordinary UK court case involving a 15-year-old girl thought to be at risk of sudden death because of a “dangerously high” dose of this cross-sex hormone drug.

    England’s High Court heard expert evidence that the teenager, known as J, whose history included autism, self-harm and anorexia, had identified as a boy and was prescribed online a double (“loading”) dose of adult-level testosterone to initiate masculinisation of her body.

    A comparable “loading” dose of adult testosterone is suggested as a starting dose for female adolescents in the 2018 “Australian standards of care” treatment guideline issued by the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) Melbourne and used by clinics following the “gender-affirming” model across Australia. There is no public data on how many girls nationwide have been exposed to this high-dose testosterone treatment.

    Setting out the issues in the UK case of J earlier this month, Judge Sir Andrew McFarlane noted the evidence of an Australian paediatric endocrinologist1, Dr Jacky Hewitt, that the testosterone level in J’s blood was “dangerously high” in October 2023 after treatment running from January to August that year.

    He said Dr Hewitt had advised the court that, “apart from the potential for adverse long-term consequences of such a level, J was ‘presently at risk of sudden death due to thromboembolic disease’, meaning the potential for the hormone to cause thickening of the blood [polycythaemia].”…

    “Dr Hewitt advised ‘with confidence’ that ‘there is no professional society of paediatric endocrinologists internationally who would consider this anything other than a highly abnormal and frankly negligent approach’. She stated that ‘in Australia, the treatment provided by GenderGP would be unlawful’.”…

    She had “never before (in her 20 years in the field) seen such a ‘massive dose’ of testosterone administered to a young person,” said Judge McFarlane.

    […]

    “When a child enters the clinic of a paediatric gender endocrinologist for their first injection of a puberty blocker, they have zero endocrine disease. That child’s hormone levels are all exactly where they should be. Yet when they leave, the paediatric gender endocrinologist has induced abnormal hormone levels. When that child turns 16, that iatrogenic hormone suppression has continued. The paediatric gender endocrinologist then goes one step further, and deliberately introduces exogenous sex hormones. They deliberately raise a female’s testosterone to levels that can only be described as pathological. They are inducing iatrogenic disease. On purpose. Not as a side effect, but deliberately.”—Paediatrician Dr Dylan Wilson, Substack post, May 2022

    […]

    “In 2022, almost 500 females aged 14-18 started Australian government-funded testosterone as if they were being treated for the male malady of ‘androgen deficiency due to an established testicular disorder’.”—Gender Clinic News, November 2023

  • Campus antisemitism

    From Joe Lockard, associate professor of English at Arizona State University:

    Calls for the elimination of the Jewish homeland, Israel, or the deprivation of an equal Palestinian right to self-determination are equally abominable. It is exactly this eliminationism that gained voice at our university and many others where protesters chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” There are frequent defenses that this slogan refers to civic equality. That is neither factual nor truthful. Hamas states openly in both its original and amended charters that liberating Palestine “from the river to the sea” would entail the liquidation of Israel and establishment of an Islamic state. The October 7 pogrom should leave no doubt that this means the liquidation of Jews together with the state.

    When a crowd on a US campus begins chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they are repeating words endorsed by Hamas and the death threat embodied in them. For anyone aware of and sensitive to the history of massacres threatened and enacted against the Jewish people, this chant is the functional equivalent of the Nazi salute, “Seig heil!” Encampments have lent both indirect and direct political support to the theo-fascist movement that is Hamas.

    The boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement—in which all the encampments participate—is no less problematic. With a history of over a millennium, boycotts and sanctions against Jews and Jewish communities are perhaps the oldest form of organized racism in the western world. BDS, today’s version of this ancient and much repeated call to separate and isolate Jews, requires a rejection or renunciation of Jewish self-determination. It demands a boycott until the “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” ends—that is, until Israel no longer exists. BDS organizer Omar Barghouti has stated repeatedly that the “decolonization” process that the boycott represents can end only in the elimination of Israel. Despite the presence in the encampments of a few Jewish students, who attempt to provide a veneer of Jewish approval, Jewish communities throughout the United States overwhelmingly and emphatically reject BDS calls as antisemitism.

    The antisemitism that has flourished in campus encampments has spread throughout the US educational system. A schoolmate in Arizona called my sixth-grade daughter a “Zionist terrorist”; her best friend in Massachusetts got labeled a “Zionist baby killer”; and Jewish children in Maryland report numerous hate incidents. Schoolchildren learn epithets from social examples in online media. Rhetoric from the encampments and their signage have flooded the media and provided models of how to insult Jews rather than work for mutual respect and empathy.

    And Victor Davis Hanson:

    Of course, after the October 7 IDF entry into Gaza, the demonstrations became far bolder and more numerous, but not really different in their aims and rhetoric. More often, Jewish students were chased and assaulted. Few if any protestors asked whether supposedly identifiable Jewish students were pro- or anti-Israel, but simply harassed any who seemed Jewish.

    Why did the patently illegal occupation of campus property spread? Why the escalation to medieval anti-Semitic threats to Jews and various takes on the “Final Solution?”

    One, throngs of poorly educated American students—many of them part of the diversity/equity/identity movement—saw Gaza as fuel for their Marxist-themed binary of oppressed versus oppressors. So they eagerly plugged Israel into the tired role of a white, interloping, neo-colonialist, and “settler” state—on the correct assumption that they had grown up with the assurance that smearing whites in racist fashion was not only tolerated but encouraged as a blow against white “privilege,” “supremacy,” or “rage.”

    These settler and colonialist smears were ahistorical. Jewish “settler” culture and civilization date before 1200 B.C.—some 1800 years prior to the Arab invasions that displaced Byzantine control of the Middle East. But then again, remember, we are dealing with the supposed moral and intellectual elite of America who have no idea what “Palestine” means or where it came from and certainly could not identify Gaza on a map. They often charge America with genocide, but otherwise they were not too bothered by the medieval-style beheadings, rape, and mutilations of October 7.

    The students also know little of the “Final Solution” or what their prompters meant by “Go Back to Poland” (again, the ovens of Auschwitz). Instead, clueless, indulged students provide the American-citizen fodder for the protests. They know how campus unrest unfolds and the predictable Munich-like responses of campus administrators and blue-city mayors and governors.

    At 11 million, Israel’s population is vastly outnumbered by some 500 million Arab and Muslim neighbors, many of whom are existentially hostile. So the idea of an imperial overdog or colonialist oppressor Israel is absurd. Most of the hatred in the Arab world and its expatriates on Western campuses toward Israel is driven by envy and frustration that Israel is a humane, free, prosperous, and lawful constitutional state in a way most Arab nations are still not. Add that the Arab world has prompted five or six serial wars against Israel, lost them all, and on spec resorted to terrorism to gain what their militaries could not—and yet Israel still prospers while its neighbors do not since that would mean to dismantle autocracy, tribalism, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, and inert socialist economies….

  • The ANC and Iran

    This sounds all too plausible. From the JC:

    South Africa brought the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in return for bribes from Iran, a group of 160 lawyers has alleged.

    In a letter to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the lawyers say that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) experienced a sudden financial turnaround after it launched the ICJ case, a fact that warrants an inquiry under America’s anti-corruption Magnitsky Act.

    Organised by the Israel Law Centre, Shurat HaDin, the letter – signed by legal experts from the US, Israel, Australia, Canada, England, Hong Kong, Brazil, France, Singapore and Netherlands – also draws attention to a series of meetings between ANC leaders and Iranian officials.

    Days after October 7, the ANC’s foreign minister Naledi Pandor flew to Tehran to meet her Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

    The pair discussed what Pandor referred to as Israel’s “apartheid”.

    ANC politicians also met Hamas when they visited South Africa in December.

    Hamas’s former government minister Basem Naim and its representative in Iran, Khaled Qaddoumi, were part of the delegation.

    The visit underscored the “cosy” relationship between South Africa and Hamas, one Israeli official said at the time. Weeks after Hamas’s visit, South Africa filed against Israel at the ICJ.

    The letter suggests that the rapid improvements in the ANC’s sudden financial position can be linked to these meetings and the ICJ case.

    The ANC has had crippling financial difficulties, but after it tabled the genocide case at the Hague, the party announced that its finances had stabilised.

  • Putting trans activism ahead of the needs of rape victims

    Jo Bartosch at Spiked on the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre scandal:

    Do rape-crisis centres exist to support rape victims, or to validate the beliefs of gender ideologues? This was the question at the heart of a recent UK tribunal ruling….

    It has long been clear that [Mridul] Wadhwa has put his trans activism ahead of the needs of the women the ERCC is supposed to serve. Back in 2021, he appeared on the popular podcast, The Guilty Feminist, to talk about his career. When asked about whether women should be entitled to access rape-crisis centres that are free of men, he said:

    ‘Sexual violence happens to bigoted people as well. And so, you know, it is not a discerning crime… These spaces are also for you. But if you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature, we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma. But please also expect to be challenged on your prejudices.’

    There could hardly be a more glaring example of Wadhwa’s lack of respect for women’s boundaries. This is a man – biologically and legally (he does not have a gender-recognition certificate) – who thinks he has a right not only to run a women’s shelter, but also to ‘re-educate’ and chastise the women who come there seeking help.

    As it happens, there is a service in Scotland for those supposedly ‘bigoted’ survivors of sexual violence who need support. In 2022, in part as a response to the takeover of the women’s sector by trans activists, JK Rowling funded a single-sex centre called Beira’s Place. But workers at the ERCC were barred from referring women there or even advising them of its existence. Wadhwa told ERCC staff that Beira’s Place is an organisation ‘founded on a platform of exclusion, misinformation and what I would describe as white feminist imperialism, that interesting combination of the flaws of white feminism and the white saviourism of colonialists and of course capitalism of which the founder is a beneficiary’. This is a long-winded way of saying that ERCC staff should go out of their way to avoid helping women who don’t share the boss’s ideology.

    While also throwing out some suitably radical-sounding catch phrases – "white feminist imperialism", "white saviourism of colonialists" – to attract the non-thinking progressive and disguise the blatant misogyny at the heart of his ERCC takeover.

    With what a feminist might refer to as male entitlement, Wadhwa has pushed himself into the women’s sector where he and his cronies have reshaped the services that desperate women rely on. Those who were brave enough to question him, those for whom looking after women was their highest priority, were frozen out and silenced.

    It takes courage for a survivor of sexual violence to pick up the phone and ask for help. It can often be decades before women make the decision to ask for support. When they do, what they need is unconditional understanding, not judgement or chastisement. Rape-crisis centres ought to serve survivors, not pander to the eccentric beliefs of men.

  • A state of Palestine

    Spain, Norway, and Ireland, inspired by the Hamas October 7th pogrom, say they will recognise a Palestinian state. Lovely. But will a Palestinian state recognise Israel?

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    So you want to recognize the state of Palestine? By all means. Go ahead. Just make sure to note that since Palestine is a state, no-one living in it is or can be or will be recognized by your country as a "refugee from Palestine", that you are therefore defunding UNRWA, that there is no such thing as a "right of return" into another sovereign state in which one has never been a citizen or ever lived.

    If you're not ready to so as a package, then please don't pretend that the purpose of recognizing Palestine is to promote "a two state solution". Given that there was never a moment in the last century when there was an Arab Palestinian vision of peace and two states where one of the states is Jewish – which means acceptance that no-one is a "refugee from Palestine" when already living there or as citizens of Jordan and other countries, and that there is no such "right of return" into the territory of the sovereign state of Israel of people who were never its citizens – then now might be a great time to start clarifying that.

    A recognition of a state of Palestine is a great way to finally clarify – is the other state in the "two state solution" the Jewish state of Israel? Or, is it, as Palestinians continue to believe, a temporary aberration that will revert to being Arab in due course?It is high time to ensure that any vision of peace by two states means that one of these two state is Jewish. And if not, it would be nice to finally know that your country recognizes Palestine because it believes that "from water to water Palestine will be Arab" – the original Arab version of "From the River to the Sea" – and that there is no room for Jewish sovereignty anywhere. Precisely the vision that animated Hamas October 7th attack and the continued support it enjoys among Palestinians. If this is why your country is recognizing Palestine, it would be a good time for Israel to finally know that.

    If not, if you genuinely believe in a two-state solution where one of the two is Jewish, then get off your bum and make it clear – that recognition of Palestine comes with a strong declaration and policy that no-one living in it is or can be or will be recognized by your country as a "refugee from Palestine", that you are therefore defunding UNRWA, that there is no such thing as a "right of return" into another sovereign state in which one has never been a citizen or ever lived. Then we'll know you're serious. Anything else is lazy virtue signaling, worthy of an Anthropology student in the US, not a government of a proper country.

    See also, Salman Rushdie:

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  • A general mood of histrionic unreality

    Kathleen Stock heads to Charleston House in deepest Sussex – once the country retreat of the Bloomsbury set – for Nicola Sturgeon, in her new-found role as brave survivor and post-political sage, in a "conversation with transgender author Juno Dawson":

    There is a mental delusion called Capgras Syndrome, during which a person becomes convinced that someone in their life has been secretly replaced with an identical duplicate. During my hour in the Charleston tent, I started dimly to understand what this must be like. For in many ways the version of Sturgeon in front of me seemed to bear only the vaguest of relations to her historical doppelganger North of the Border….

    By the time she got to the bit about how toxic the public discourse about “trans rights” had become, and how trans people had become a public scapegoat, because citizens “struggling” with “a cost of living crisis” and “rising levels of poverty” — “particularly young people who suffered during Covid” — were looking “for somebody to blame”, I started to check what was in my drink. “I just have this belief that people should be allowed to be who they are, feel comfortable, respected, safe and able to live with dignity as who they want to be,” said the premier who had overseen the putting of violent male felons in terrifyingly close quarters with impoverished, vulnerable female prisoners, with no apparent thought to the safety or dignity of the latter.

    Was it really she who had closed her ears to any possible problems with introducing self-ID at age 16 upwards, arguing that some opponents would “cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable, but just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well”? Who had personally insisted that puberty blockers would still be used for physically healthy children in Scotland’s youth gender identity service even after serious concerns emerged in 2021; and whose Party was defending clinical standards at the service as late as last month? Did she really not understand why all of this might get reasonable people riled? Apparently she did not.

    The audience mostly seemed to lap it up; partly, I assume, because they knew practically nothing concrete about the speaker’s nine years in government. Nationalists often complain that the English media ignores Scottish concerns, but in this case it has clearly worked in their former leader’s favour. Still, it was also obvious that this deeply middle-class and well-heeled bunch mostly didn’t want to know about any potentially complicating factors that might temper their adulation, for that would spoil all the fun of the festival: paying £65 per day ticket to feel appalled about the state of the world and the Tories, but rather better about themselves. To this end, they needed a suitable moral heroine to side with, mentally speaking: preferably someone with a charmingly authentic regional accent, getting intermittent jabs in at their favourite hate figures while decrying toxic masculinity, and whose stated values otherwise were vague enough that you could read almost anything positive you liked into them. And it seems that they found one.

    During the Q&A, as instructed, political questions were indeed mostly eschewed, in favour of fatuous queries about who Sturgeon might like to do a podcast with (Theresa May, apparently) and which books she might leave on the desk of an incoming Prime Minister (the crime novels of her good pal Val McDermid, in case you were wondering). Towards the end of the session, a sonorously voiced male admirer seemed to encapsulate the general mood of histrionic unreality by imploring the politician: “Will you promise us, whatever the result of the Police Scotland investigation, that you will find a continuing role to speak out?”

    By then, I had heard more than enough. As I left, I reflected on the strangeness of what I’d just witnessed: the creation of an utterly fantastical world, bearing practically no relation to the actual one, being wrought in real time via the psychological co-dependency of two highly unlikely parties: on the one hand, a former Scottish Nationalist Party leader; and on the other, the sort of deeply unself-aware, affluent, self-satisfied and soft-minded Southerner who for decades has been a source of both mockery and fury to most Scottish Nationalists in practice. When that memoir eventually does come out, she’ll know exactly where to go to sell it.

    As for Sturgeon's role in the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre scandal, and the appointment of her friend Mridul Wadhwa – well, I doubt we've heard the last of that particular can of worms…