Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Under Sharia Law

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    The Iranian Jewish man due to be executed by the Islamic Regime has been identified as 20 year old Arvin Netanel.

    Arvin loaned money to a Muslim man who refused to pay him back. When confronted, the Muslim man attacked Arvin with a knife. Arvin fought back in self defense and the Muslim man was accidentally killed.

    Under Sharia Law, since Arvin is Jewish, the family of the slain Muslim man can demand the death penalty, WITHOUT ANY LEGAL DUE PROCESS.

    If the situation were reversed, a non-Muslim would NOT have the same right.

    Arvin’s family has begged the Muslim man’s family to show mercy, and have even offered financial compensation, but the family has refused. They demand that the Jewish man be put to DEATH.

    Arvin’s desperate mother is begging the international community to raise awareness of Arvin’s impending execution which has been postponed to Monday.

  • At the Central California Women’s Facility

    The latest from Reduxx. 

    A trans-identified male inmate appears to have been transferred back to a men’s prison after being charged with rape while in custody at a women’s prison. Tremaine “Tremayne” Deon Carroll, a male who identifies as a woman, was housed at the Central California Women’s Facility [CCWF] when the sexual assault took place but has since been moved to Kern Valley State Prison.

    Carroll’s criminal history dates back to 1988, when he began participating in organized crime at just 15 years old. In 1990, Carroll would be convicted for his participation in an armed robbery where he and several other men broke into an apartment occupied by two women. The women were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and held under demand of ransom.

    Despite being only 17 years old, the brutality of the crime resulted in Carroll being charged as an adult with three counts of kidnapping for ransom, two counts of robbery, and three counts of oral copulation by force.

    Then the California self-ID law for criminals came in, and Tremaine suddenly became "Tremayne".

    But in a case filed in March of 2021, Carroll suddenly invoked SB-132, also known as the Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act. The law had been implemented just three months prior, and formally established the ability of inmates to be housed on the basis of their gender identity in California.

    And off he goes, this violent sexual predator, to the women's prison. What could possibly go wrong?

    The ACLU were involved, of course:

    Ironically, Carroll is one of the trans-identified males intervening in a lawsuit that seeks to prevent males from being housed in women’s prisons in California. The lawsuit, launched against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, includes four female inmates who all stated they had been victimized by trans-identified male transfers.

    In 2022, the ACLU intervened in the case, suggesting that the state of California could not adequately fight the lawsuit and represent the interests of trans-identified males.

    In his sworn testimony collected by the ACLU for the case, Carroll declared: “I know what it feels like to live in fear and to carry the weight of the past abuse by men. But I am not a threat [to women]. I strongly believe that everyone here at CCWF would benefit from more structured interaction — opportunities to sit and talk with each other and realize that we’re all in the same boat.”

    Added: there are protests:

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  • Returned

    One of the three bodies of hostages recovered by the IDF today. 

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  • The Saga of the Greens

    It gets weirder…

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  • A “no-go area” for Jews and Israelis

    From the Telegraph:

    Students who have raised concerns over anti-Semitism at Oxford University have been told they should leave, a letter from staff and students claims.

    The letter, sent to Prof Irene Tracey, the university’s vice-chancellor, as well as deans and proctors, claims that there has been a lack of aid and sympathy for Jews, who face harassment and a hostile environment on campus.

    The letter, whose signatories wish to remain anonymous, also accused the university of promoting “conspiratorial narratives”, as well as failure in reporting procedures in the past seven months.

    They claim the university is becoming a “no-go area” for Jews and Israelis and that when some individuals raised concerns to their heads of programmes, they were “simply advised to leave Oxford”.

    The letter, seen by The Telegraph, states: “We have felt isolated, unsafe, targeted, stressed, disappointed, angry and hopeless. Many of us have faced all manners of anti-Semitic slurs.”

    It also details a list of 70 incidents that are alleged to have occurred since the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on Oct 7.

    The letter says a group of students told a Jewish student that “the Jews control the American government”, “Jews are everywhere”, and that they had “a Jewish nose”.

    In another incident, the signatories said: “In vigils for the [Israeli] hostages, university members, mainly students, shouted at us, told us we are kid murderers, that we are spreading conspiracy theories and ‘Zionist propaganda’, and they vandalised our displays for the hostages. In fact, almost every time we did such a display, it was vandalised by organised groups from the university.”

    They also claim that calls for violence are constantly heard in pro-Palestinian protests in Oxford, such as calling for the elimination of the Jewish state, “Palestine from the river to the sea”, “Intifada”, “the resistance is justified”, “globalise the Intifada”, “Israel is a terror state”, “From Oxford to Gaza: long live the Intifada”, “Israel, Oxford, USA, how many kids did you kill today?”.

    It rhymes! So clever. A copy, of course, of the old Vietnam protest chant "Hey hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" But with considerably less force. It's all tawdry and secondhand – and powered by the usual antisemitic tropes.

    The letter, which was sent last week, states: “Those places at the university, sometimes during working hours, became a no-go area for most Israelis and Jewish for seven months now.”

    Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Jewish student who is one of the letter’s authors, said: “This has been an issue since October and the university has not addressed anything or given any resources to dealing with this.

    “There seems to be a problem regarding the academic information given out by the university on the matter of Jewish and Israeli people. Faculty members and hosted speakers feel comfortable to really spread misinformation without any type of monitoring from the university or any type of response. This just creates this mentality where people feel comfortable to tell other Jewish students that they control the banks and that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist – and this is Oxford University.”

  • “That played with my anxiety”

    From the Cumberland News:

    A supermarket worker who made indecent images of a child failed to attend court because she was scared to face ‘who she used to be’.

    Emma Davies, 59, admitted making two Category C indecent images of a child when she appeared before magistrates in Workington on Tuesday.

    She also admitted she had failed to surrender to court bail the previous day and apologised to magistrates for this.

    Davies said: “Because of who I now am, although the responsibility is now mine, the person I used to be, throughout my life, this has always been there.

    “I was having to face who I used to be. I was terrified. I didn’t know how you were going to address me in court. That played with my anxiety.” Referring to a name change, the defendant added: “It’s a legal status now and everything.”

    This is, in other words, a man, charged with a serious sexual offence, who now plays the victim since he's grown his hair and claims to be a woman.

    Cumberland
    [Image (edited): Newsquest]

    Davies, of Moor Place, Frizington, was granted bail, with conditions not to reside at any premises where children under the age of 18 are present and not to have any unsupervised contact with children under 18, as is unavoidable in the course of everyday life.

    This would allow the defendant to continue her job at Asda, the court heard.

    Keith Southward, chair of the magistrates’ panel, told Davies: “You will be addressed as you wish to be addressed, so don’t worry about it.”

    Well phew. We'd hate to see him misgendered or anything.

  • The other “nakbas”

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    This May and every May, Palestinians around the world mourn over 70 years of what they term “Zionist imperialism” and the “nakba” (catastrophe) they have endured. The prevailing narrative tells the story of “white” Jewish Europeans colonizing the land of the indigenous “brown” Palestinians, within the context of European colonialism and white supremacy. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict garners significant global attention, with Palestinians and their advocates being particularly vocal.

    However, lost in the debate over the Palestinian experience are the stories of tens of millions of victims of genocide, expulsion, and forced assimilation under Arab and Turkish imperialism. My family, with Amazigh Jewish roots on my father's side and Babylonian (Iraqi) Jewish roots on my mother's, experienced expulsion and persecution, leading me to discover these largely untold stories.

    Many other groups have faced similar persecution without restitution or the “right of return,” and the global community remains silent. Why the double standards?

    Over the past 150 years, similar “nakbas” have occurred among those indigenous to North Africa, the Middle East, and the Eastern Mediterranean.

    The approximate number of victims from less-publicized genocides includes Assyrians (300,000 from 1914-1920), Armenians (1.5 million from 1914-1923), Kurds (50,000-180,000 from 1986-1989), Greeks (450,000-750,000 from 1913-1920), Yazidis (10,000 in 2014 alone), and Sudanese in Darfur (300,000 from 2003-2009).

    Victims of expulsion and persecution leading to emigration include Lebanese Maronites (8-14 million in the diaspora, 4 million in Lebanon), Assyrian Christians (15 million in the diaspora and in Syria), and Armenians under the Turkish Empire (11 million in the diaspora today). In Lebanon and Syria, nationality laws deliberately bar Christians from returning, ensuring a Muslim Arab majority in these countries.

    From North African and Middle Eastern Jewish communities, 850,000 Jews were expelled or forced to flee, with one million Copts leaving Egypt. Even where expulsions or emigrations did not occur, widespread persecution did. Forced assimilation affected Berbers, Kurds, and Sudanese, with Arabization policies implemented in schools and government institutions since the 1960s. Berber only became an official language in Algeria in 2002; Kurdish was forbidden in Turkish media until then; and in Yemen, Jewish children were taken from their families for forced conversions. Numerous similar examples of persecution against Jewish communities persisted throughout the Middle East into the late 20th century. To this day, no restitution has been made for these heinous crimes.

    These are not stories typically heard in newspapers, universities, or at social gatherings in cities like London and Paris, and certainly not on channels like Al Jazeera or Turkish television. Instead, major outlets like CNN, BBC, and academic faculties in Middle Eastern studies often depict the region as being Turkish, Arab, and Iranian since ancient times. These same sources highlight 'European' and 'Zionist' aggression while ignoring the histories of other groups in the region.

    When confronted with the historical realities of Turkish and Arab oppression, these crimes are often whitewashed, with claims that the Ottoman and Arab Empires were peaceful and tolerant. These narratives overlook the fact that many groups, such as Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, Jews, and Lebanese Christians, sought independence from these empires. Smaller groups appealing to Western Europeans for help were met with violence from the imperial powers seeking to preserve their dominance.

    From the 1880s to 1923, Pan-Turkish and Pan-Arab movements claimed lands conquered under their rule as settler colonialists. The Pan-Turks pursued genocides against Greeks, Assyrians, and Armenians, while ensuring forced assimilation for Kurds and Assyrians and expelling Greeks and Armenians.

    Pan-Arabs claimed areas settled during medieval times as original Arab homelands, and after aiding the British in overcoming the Ottoman Empire, pursued imperialistic goals in multicultural countries, forcing Arab culture upon Assyrians, Amazigh, Maronites, and Egyptian Copts.

    By the 1940s, the Arab League sought to Arabize North Africa and the Middle East, implementing policies of Arabization and forced assimilation.

    At the Versailles Treaty (1919) all indigenous peoples of the Middle East— Kurds, Assyrians, Jews, Maronites—called for national self-determination.

    However, only the Jews and Armenians, under British and Russian rule respectively, achieved independence.

    As activists campaign to commemorate Palestinian Arab refugees of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I wish these advocates would extend half of the sympathy they have for Palestinians to the millions truly oppressed by imperial powers throughout history and today.

  • Making the party less safe for trans and non-binary members

    Down the purity plughole.

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  • Mills & Boon in hell

    If you enjoy vicious reviews – and who doesn't? – then this, from Tanya Gold in the JC, is well worth a read:

    The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Heather Morris’s 2018 novel about a Jew in Birkenau, has become a TV series because hunger for mainstream entertainment about the Shoah is insatiable. It is consoling – if you are not a Jew – and exciting, again if you are not a Jew. If you are very cynical, as I am, you may think it allows the reader to pretend an interest in, and care for, Jewish suffering that rarely extends to Jews who are alive….

    It is true that Morris’s book is about a real person: the Slovakian Jew Lale Sokolov, who was the tattooist at Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1942-45. He fell in love with a fellow prisoner named Gisela Fuhrmannova, married her after the war, moved to Melbourne, and lived a useful life. Lale met Morris in the years before between Gisela’s death and his own. He told her his story, I think, because he wanted absolution for surviving. He didn’t need it and, even if he did, it won’t come from a writer as credulous and self-important as Morris. The blurb says she meticulously reproduces Lale’s fate. She doesn't. She can't. (The Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre published a list of factual errors too long to type. Some are so basic they could have been resolved in an hour). She published 12 years after his death, and I wonder if that is important: the distance allowed her greater freedom to dream.

    And she does. In Morris’s hands Lale is a magic Jew: ever-imaginative, resourceful and lucky. Promoted to tattooist, and so saved, he has freedom of movement in the camps, and he dispenses food, medicine, even life itself. The problem with this, of course, is that death in Auschwitz – and almost all died, the majority on arrival – becomes, by compare, a sort of moral failure: a lack of imagination, resource and luck. For those who don’t understand Birkenau – and you wouldn’t read this book if you did, and if this is all you read you wouldn’t – it brings un-magic Jews and Nazi psychopaths no closer.

    The prose style is a minor crime. “Her eyes dance before him”. “His heart skips a beat”. “His mind [is] a whirlpool”. He works “around the clock”. (Too many transports, you see: it’s exhausting.) “Flowers. He learned from a young age, from his mother, that women love them”.

    Or, Lale says, “always dress to impress”. Lale is quite keen on fashion. On meeting the SS for the first time he thinks: “Under different circumstances he might appreciate the tailoring”. Would he? “I’m just a number,” Gisela tells him. “You should know that. You gave it to me.” As I read this junk, I write a parallel musical in my head and I think: if that doesn’t close Act 2, what can? There is a rogue, too: Josef Mengele, who is a sort of pantomime villain like Captain Hook. He stalks around with a soul “colder than his scalpel”, smirks and steals people’s testicles. It never happened….

    If you want to read about the Shoah read histories and memoir. Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night are partial, but they don’t pretend to be anything else. Levi himself said: “We who survived the camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless”. But that is Levi, not Morris, who has the gumption to write Mills & Boon in hell. It fulfils the criteria of the Shoah novel for idiots, at least. It makes the reader feel better, know less, and care less, about the people who are fictionalised. That is, they die twice.

    Still, there’s laughter in the trying. I would have called it Under a Birkenau Moon. Or Love Macht Frei.

  • Politics and truth in the academy

    As Samuel Rubinstein argues, at UnHerd, the present emphasis at universities on social justice rather than the pursuit of truth and free enquiry has some unfortunate historical parallels:

    Columbia in 2024 is very far indeed from Heidelberg in 1933. Still, the history of the universities under Nazism, and of historians under Nazism in particular, gives us good reason to be wary of the politicisation of higher education. Jonathan Haidt recently argued that “universities must choose one telos: truth or social justice”. And it is strange but instructive to recall that the Nazi universities emphatically chose “social justice” (as they would see it) over “truth”.

    On 18 January 1934, almost a year after Hitler came to power, a historian named Ulrich Kahrstedt delivered a speech urging his colleagues at the University of Göttingen to do their bit for Germany’s “new culture”. His speech contained all the lurid images that one would expect. The Treaty of Versailles had been an intolerable humiliation; ethnic Germans over the border in Poland were routinely “hunted down and killed”. He reserved particular contempt for those in his faculty who seemed to care more about the plight of their Jewish colleagues than the misfortunes of their own race — those who shed more tears over the “daughter of the cattle dealer Levi not being accepted as a student” than over the “scores of German women who killed themselves after being violated by Negroes”.

    Hitler, according to Kahrstedt, had come to rescue the Germans from this pitiable state, and in that task the universities had an important part to play. Kahrstedt’s audience was then well-primed for the climax of his speech:

    “We reject international science, we reject the international republic of letters, we reject research for research’s sake. Here, medicine is taught and learned not to increase the number of known bacteria, but rather to keep Germans healthy and strong. Here, history is taught and learned not to say ‘how it actually was’, but to let the Germans learn from how it actually was. Here, the natural sciences are taught and learned not to discover abstract laws, but to help the Germans to sharpen their tools in the competition between peoples.”

    These two neat rhetorical triads were then fittingly capped off with a third: “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” […]

    Hitler himself subscribed to such a position: on the very first page of Mein Kampf he describes how history was his favourite subject at school because it aroused his political passions. And of course Kahrstedt, in his speech on 18 January 1934, violently rejected the notion that the historian’s task is simply to find out “how it actually was” — here citing the 19th-century Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke — arguing instead that historians ought to devote their work wholly to contemporary political ends. We find something even more strikingly “postmodern” in the declaration of Moritz Edelmann, the editor of the Nazi historical journal Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (“Past and Present”), that history should “liberate itself from the dependence on the written source” in service of present needs.

    The experience of the German universities in the Thirties should therefore disabuse us of various popular ideas. Students do not have a special affinity for social justice: their protests and obsessions do not need to be revered as though they contain moral truths inaccessible to others. Education in the humanities does not really instil “empathy” or “good citizenship”, whatever some of its advocates like to say. And if, finally, there is anything to be learned from this dark chapter in the history of scholarship, it surely is this: we cannot allow politics to supplant truth as the university’s highest end.