Politics and Culture
John Vachon, February 1943. "Rio Grande, Gallia County, Ohio. Farm labor training program to aid in war food production. Mrs. Younkers grading eggs. There are three boys in this family who will also help with farm work."
[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]
That Green Party councillor in Leeds, – not alone among the new breed of Green councillors, it seems, in being more concerned with promoting a hatred of Jews and of Israel than with saving whales – has prompted concern from the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism:
The Green Party faces a showdown with Lord Mann, the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, over the conduct of councillors newly elected under its banner.
One who shouted Allahu akbar (God is greatest) and described getting a seat on Leeds city council as a “win for the people of Gaza” had previously been involved in the harassment of a Jewish university chaplain driven from his home.
Two who won seats in Bristol had been involved in social media posts which led the city’s Labour Party to fear that the Greens were becoming a haven for antisemitism.
A Peterborough Green councillor has also been shown by the Jewish press to have made insulting anti-Israel comments….
The new face of the Green Party, which has traditionally been involved in campaigning to save hedgerows and improve air quality, came as a surprise to observers of last week’s local elections.
Three of the four councillors whose activities have raised cause for concern were previously Labour supporters or activists, raising the likelihood that Jeremy Corbyn fans have been migrating to the Greens and changing their culture.
Mothin Ali, wearing a keffiyeh, the scarf symbolic of Palestinian resistance, celebrated his victory in Leeds by raising his arm in the air and saying: “We will not be silenced. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu akbar!”
Ali was known for stirring up hostility to Rabbi Zacheria Deutsch, the Jewish chaplain at Leeds University, who was advised by police to go into hiding with his wife and two children after death and rape threats. Deutsch, a citizen of Israel, was called up as a reservist with the Israeli Defence Forces after the Hamas massacres of October 7 last year.
Ali, a prolific YouTuber, ranted on social media: “This creep, that’s the only way I can describe him, is someone who went from Leeds to Israel to kill children and women and everyone else over there”.
He told Leeds University: “You should be protecting students from this kind of animal, because if he’s willing to kill people over there, how do you know he’s not going to kill your students over here?”…
Ali, a former Labour supporter, has been photographed with Corbyn, who he described as a “great guy”. Mann wrote to the Greens last month about social media activity by some of their candidates in Bristol.
The Green Party has long been a haven for cranks, and that kind of vacuous credulity is now clearly being exploited by those with an entirely different agenda.
David Rose at the Jewish Chronicle has more.
This is happening in France 🇫🇷: Hundreds of people are calling for my murder in Strasbourg because I argue that being a woman is not a feeling but a biological reality. « Dora Moutot at the bottom of the Rhin river » they’re saying. They're furious about the book I co-authored… https://t.co/P658cvM1Bz
— Dora Moutot (@doramoutot) May 4, 2024
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As someone whose death has been demanded on placards for exactly the same reason (knowing 'woman' isn't a feeling in a man's head), I send @doramoutot love and solidarity. (Btw, Strasbourg is the city of my maternal ancestors and has a long history of being overrun by despots). https://t.co/xdElMXiTmf
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 5, 2024
Stonewall continues its slide into life's rear view mirror:
Sport England has ditched its Stonewall membership amid warnings that quangos should distance themselves from the charity, it can be revealed….
It comes after Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary and women and equalities minister, warned quangos to cut ties with the charity amid fears over the influence it is having on policy and its stance on transgender issues.
Sport England had paid more than £5000 in fees to the controversial LGBTQ lobby group in the last two financial years as part of the charity's controversial diversity champions scheme, which includes guidance for employers on pronouns and gender-neutral spaces.
But it no longer expects to 'make any payments to Stonewall in this current financial year' after a review of the partnership.
Of particular relevance given Stonewall's stance on men competing in women's sport.
Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at Sex Matters, a human-rights charity that campaigns for clarity on sex in law, policy and language, said : 'It's a relief to see Sport England stepping away from Stonewall.
'Sport England gets millions of pounds of public money, and it has a duty to make sport work for everyone.
'That duty is not compatible with taking advice from Stonewall, whose approach on sport pushes for men with transgender identities to be included in women's sport.
'This is not fair or safe for women and girls, and it's not inclusive. Women and girls must have male-free teams and competitions.'
At the BBC – North Korean weapons are killing Ukrainians. The implications are far bigger:
On 2 January, a young Ukrainian weapons inspector, Krystyna Kimachuk, got word that an unusual-looking missile had crashed into a building in the city of Kharkiv. She began calling her contacts in the Ukrainian military, desperate to get her hands on it. Within a week, she had the mangled debris splayed out in front of her at a secure location in the capital Kyiv.
She began taking it apart and photographing every piece, including the screws and computer chips smaller than her fingernails. She could tell almost immediately this was not a Russian missile, but her challenge was to prove it.
Buried amidst the mess of metal and spouting wires, Ms Kimachuk spotted a tiny character from the Korean alphabet. Then she came across a more telling detail. The number 112 had been stamped onto parts of the shell. This corresponds to the year 2023 in the North Korean calendar. She realised she was looking at the first piece of hard evidence that North Korean weapons were being used to attack her country….
For all the recent talk of Kim Jong Un preparing to start a nuclear war, the more immediate threat is now North Korea's ability to fuel existing wars and feed global instability.
Ms Kimachuk works for Conflict Armament Research (CAR), an organisation that retrieves weapons used in war, to work out how they were made. But it wasn't until after she had finished photographing the wreckage of the missile and her team analysed its hundreds of components, that the most jaw-dropping revelation came.
It was bursting with the latest foreign technology. Most of the electronic parts had been manufactured in the US and Europe over the past few years. There was even a US computer chip made as recently as March 2023. This meant that North Korea had illicitly procured vital weapons components, snuck them into the country, assembled the missile, and shipped it to Russia in secret, where it had then been transported to the frontline and fired – all in a matter of months.
"This was the biggest surprise, that despite being under severe sanctions for almost two decades, North Korea is still managing to get its hands on all it needs to make its weapons, and with extraordinary speed," said Damien Spleeters, the deputy director at CAR….
Since the 1980s North Korea has sold its weapons abroad, largely to countries in the North Africa and the Middle East, including Libya, Syria and Iran. They have tended to be old, Soviet-style missiles with a poor reputation. There is evidence that Hamas fighters likely used some of Pyongyang's old rocket-propelled grenades in their attack last 7 October.
But the missile fired on 2 January, that Ms Kimachuk took apart, was seemingly Pyongyang's most sophisticated short-range missile – the Hwasong 11 – capable of travelling up to 700km (435 miles).
Although the Ukrainians have downplayed their accuracy, Dr Jeffrey Lewis, an expert in North Korean weapons and non-proliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, says they appear to be not much worse than the Russian missiles.
The advantage of these missiles is that they are extremely cheap, explained Dr Lewis. This means you can buy more and fire more, in the hope of overwhelming air defences, which is exactly what the Russians appear to be doing.
So Ukraine acts as a shop window for North Korean arms. And everyone will want some of the action….Iran, Syria, the Houthis….you name it. It's not a happy scenario.
A long time ago, in distant memory, the Greens were, you kinow, global warming, saving the whales. It's in the name. Then it was taken over by the gender crew, and it was all trans pride. And now it's….Gaza.
UK – Gipton and Harehills in Leeds, has been won by the … erm ….Green Party.
Here the winning candidate makes it clear what his agenda is and it certainly doesn’t sound like it’s the environment “Allahu Akbar”
The media has neglected to show you this council result. pic.twitter.com/CqtExvDebQ
— Artemis (@Artemisfornow) May 4, 2024
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Back to green, at least.
Another Café Royal Books production, this time from photographer Kemal Cengizkan:
[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Kemal Cengizkan]
RECENT STUDY: "Gender-affirming surgery" is significantly associated with elevated suicide attempt risks.
Individuals who underwent "gender-affirming surgery" had a 12.12-fold higher suicide attempt risk than those who did not. pic.twitter.com/B7utCb5Fv1— Stats For Gender (@statsforgender) May 3, 2024
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Um…isn't this the precise opposite of what we've been told, ad nauseam? – that without "gender-affirming surgery" all these "trans kids" would kill themselves?
Julie Bindel in the Sun:
Sinead Watson, is a bright, humorous woman who speaks her mind and has a permanent twinkle in her eyes. But just over a decade ago, 33-year-old Sinead temporarily became Sean, a surly, angry trans man.
At the age of 20, feeling desperately unhappy, and suffering trauma from serious sexual assaults perpetrated by men, she discovered online trans communities.
Sinead convinced herself that all of her problems would disappear if she underwent gender reassignment treatment.
Then, at 23 — having presented as “gender dysphoric” at the Sandyford Gender Clinic in Glasgow — Sinead was able to transition to a trans man with little pushback.
But within five years of her first appointment she was “deeply regretting” her decision and, aged 27, began living as a woman again.
Today, Sinead is in permanent pain and discomfort as a result of taking the male hormone testosterone, and has scars where her breasts used to be.
She has been living in a homeless hostel for the past six months after the breakdown of a three-year relationship, and has struggled with alcoholism.
Sinead tells me: “I’m currently single. My relationship was in tatters because I couldn’t cope with all the trauma in my life.”
Sinead is angry at the professionals at Sandyford, who she claims led her to believe she could escape her female body.
She says: “I now must live with the many permanent consequences of the ‘treatment’ I received there.
“I realised I had made a terrible mistake when I woke up after my double mastectomy.
“By then I had grown a beard, and my voice had deepened as a result of the testosterone I’d taken. I felt there was no going back.”…
She explains: “When I was seen by gender clinicians, I was allowed to make a monumental, life-changing decision but I wasn’t offered in-depth counselling. Instead, I was effectively left to self-diagnose.
“What I clearly needed was therapy. I had been the victim of sexual abuse and I told them, ‘I’m just out of psychiatric hospital. I’ve been suicidal. I have all these issues’.
“What they should have said is, ‘Let’s talk about how you ended up there’.
“But they didn’t ask me any questions about my history of trauma and abuse.
“If they had told me, ‘You’ve had some terrible experiences relating to men sexualising you because of your breasts, but there’s nothing wrong with them,’ I may not have felt the need to have them cut off.”
Instead, they affirmed Sinead immediately at her first appointment, calling out her name to see the clinician: “He’s ready for you, Mr Watson.”..
After Sinead broke down in front of her GP, she was finally referred to a therapist. She says: “When I said I regretted my transition, they suggested that I was perhaps non-binary. It was dizzying.
“I felt ready to kill myself. But I couldn’t put my loved ones through any more, so I decided to go online and find other detransitioned women.
“I found a surprisingly large number of them. And then they told me their stories.
“I basically went from being horrifically depressed and suicidal to so, so angry”.
Most of the detransitioners Sinead is in contact with are in their early 20s.
There's quite some way to go before we get the full measure of the lives destroyed by the gender cult, and its extraordinary success in getting young people mutilated in the fantastical belief that people can be "born in the wrong body".
[Bindel – "Anyone bleating about "why did you write this for the Sun?" complain to the Guardian please."]
White American students at university of Texas doing namaz (prayer). I’ve hit my limit of pretending this is remotely normal. This is the peak of mass delusional brainwashed perverse cosplay. Please make it stop. I can’t take another day of it. https://t.co/iW7I7x86eD
— Elica Le Bon الیکا ل بن (@elicalebon) May 3, 2024
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Full text:
I'm an Iranian woman and have lived under the Islamic Republic for 20,5 years. I moved to Germany because I thought the values I considered important would be respected in "free" Western countries.
People cannot even imagine how triggering it is for us to see the unholy unity of islamists and radical leftists. This is the very phenomena that changed the history of my country for the worse. I am beyond disgusted and disturbed.
To the women standing behind literal terrorists and islamists saying prayers at universities: You don't even know what you're getting yourself into. None of you have read the "Al Nisa" surah, where it is clearly stated that men literally own you and have the right to hit you if you refuse to have sex with them:
"Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband's) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them Means (of annoyance): For Allah is Most High, great (above you all)."
What you are standing up for today is anything but being "woke" and progressive. You should have the right to protest and stand up for causes that are important to you. But fighting Jewish students, attacking them, not understanding the fact that the hostages have to be brought back home and no peace can exist before that happens is outright wrong. People who truly advocate about and fight for human rights are NOT selective with the causes they care about. Caring about human rights is one thing, standing up behind Islamists, waving Hezbollah and Hamas flags and saying slogans that are against Jews and outright radical are not it.
Mick Hartley 