Mick Hartley

Phoebe Stern in Tablet – My Friends Wish I Was Dead:

What does it mean to be a Zionist student on a college campus today? I have friends at schools all over the country who are struggling. People who are afraid to wear their necklace with a Star of David for fear of repercussions. To be a Zionist is to be an outcast. Classmates think that you are supporting a genocidal, apartheid state. They don’t care enough to hear your story. They don’t care that you lost dear friends and are mourning the pre-Oct. 7 Israel that will never exist again. They turn a blind eye to facts and choose to look only at social media posts that support their antisemitic narrative. What’s the point of arguing with such people? I am reminded of Golda Meir’s line, “You cannot negotiate peace with someone who has come to kill you.”

Now they have come for me. The antisemitic posts began on Oct. 7, and swung into a higher gear after I spent a week volunteering in Israel over Bates College’s spring break in late February. I pulled three choice quotes of what my fellow students had to say about me. Spoiler: They apparently wish me dead.

“Big nose mafia going to cancel me but man you know who should’ve finished the job.”

“Phoebe Stern did [go to Israel] … She fat and ugly anyways … just because she supports genocide doesn’t mean we get to be misogynistic.”

“She’s a racist bigot and the only question we should be asking ourselves is if she really believes the violent, racist lies she’s been spreading.”

My mind was reeling. Other Jewish friends at Bates were also attacked. They were accused of being racists and bigots, in writing, both online and on their dorm doors. One post from a Bates classmate advocated that “Hitler should’ve finished off the job.” People were using the anonymity of social media to spread lies and put words in my mouth, that I was going around campus telling people that my Arab peers want to kill me—a sentence that I have never uttered in my life, and wholeheartedly disagree with…

"Big nose mafia". “Hitler should’ve finished off the job.” Oh boy. When it's presented as progressive and righteous, out come the old antisemitic tropes. Not gone, just lurking there, waiting for the chance to make a comeback.

As Hadley Freeman notes, there are parallels with gender ideology. Once misogyny and homophobia are dressed up in progressive language, it all comes out…

Following on from Iran's Shiraz University in their invitation to protesting US students, it's now the turn of those nice Houthis:

Pro-Palestinian protesters who have taken over US campuses this week have been invited by the Houthis to study in Yemen’s Sana’a University

Sana’a University, which is run by the Iran-backed Houthis, issued a statement on Friday applauding the “humanitarian” position of students in the US who have occupied university campuses.

The statement included an email address for any students who wished to enquire about transferring.

“We are serious about welcoming students that have been suspended from US universities for supporting Palestinians,” an official at Sana’a University said.

“We are fighting this battle with Palestine in every way we can,” the official added.

You might think that invitations and support from two of the most repressive regimes in the world – where gays are hung, women are veiled, and Islamic jihad by sword is the ideology – might cause a momentary flicker of doubt with the anti-Israel campus activists as to whether they really are quite the progressives they like to think. Considering the chants we've heard about the Houthis "decolonising" the Red Sea, though, and the "heroics" of Hamas for raping and killing Israelis, the level of delusion would seem to be way too strong for any such critical thinking. 

Yesterday I posted that Hadley Freeman trailer for her Jewish Quarterly article Blindness: October 7 and the Left. Now there's an extract at UnHerd – Why the Left failed on October 7:

A sentence I never imagined I’d write: I now think Jeremy Corbyn did Jews in Britain a favour. His time as Labour leader, between 2015 and 2020, was an extremely weird one for British Jews, but eye-opening all the same: I now think it prepared many of us for the Left’s reaction to October 7, whereas American Jews seemed far more surprised. The gaslighting (the attack didn’t happen), the defences (if it did, Jews deserved it), the hectoring moral superiority (how can you care about that when this is so much more important?): all that we saw after October 7, we had seen under Corbyn….

When Corbyn was pushed out of Labour in 2020, I dismissed him as a useful idiot, which was right. I also dismissed him as a blip, an aberration, one I needn’t think about again, which was wrong. Because then October 7 happened. I realised that the Corbyn era had opened a Pandora’s box and some ghosts cannot be controlled.

Antisemitism found a new point of entry through identity politics, which argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression. As Yascha Mounk writes in The Identity Trap, adherents of identity politics believe that, in the name of fairness, liberal democracies need to jettison universal values such as free speech and respect for diverse opinions — values long championed by the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, we should now see everyone through the prisms of race and sexual orientation and treat them differently, depending on their identity group and how much oppression they have historically suffered.

To make this simplistic ideology even more simple, identity politics divides the world into two racial categories: “white” (defined as colonising oppressors) and “people of colour” (the oppressed). This is how the Left pivoted from talking about class to talking about race. It is also why antisemitism is thriving again on university campuses, as supporters of identity politics combine with activists for black and Muslim causes, who see Jews as ultra-white and therefore oppressive. And to be clear, those activists aren’t necessarily Black or Muslim themselves; in fact, as multiple students have told me, they are often white, but see supporting these causes — and trashing Israel and Jews — as a means of proving their allyship and exonerating themselves from white guilt….

One of the biggest problems with this framework is its inability to accommodate competing rights, and the idea that two groups can both be right. I got a glimpse of this in 2015, when I started to write about gender ideology, which argues that trans women should be accorded all the rights biological women have, such as access to female single-sex spaces. The problems seemed glaring to me, but as I quickly learned, asking any questions sparked furious accusations of transphobia from the progressive Left.

Identity politics, you see, is a zero-sum game, and for one group to be all good, the group with competing rights must be all bad. So, in the case of gender ideology, trans people are all good, and women who are anxious about the erosion of their rights are evil. And so identity politics gave Left-wing men a self-righteous cover so they could deride women like me, and feel morally superior for doing so.

It’s a similar story with the progressive Left’s reaction to Israel and Palestine: a lot of it is about antisemitism, but identity politics obscures the bigotry, giving the Left a preeningly self-righteous excuse to ignore Hamas’s terrorism and violence against Jews. This comparison between how women and Jews are discussed in identity politics is not new. In February, Corinne Blacker wrote in Tablet magazine that, thanks to the energetic efforts of gender ideologue and anti-Israel academic Judith Butler, antisemitism has been “queered”, meaning anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist is seen as analogous to a bigot who hates trans people. Only trans people and Palestinians are seen as oppressed, and never women or Jews….

Powerful piece.

It's a win-win situation – Iranian university offers scholarships to expelled student protesters in US and Europe.

An Iranian university is reportedly offering scholarships to American and European students who have been expelled from their universities for participating in pro-Palestine demonstrations.

According to the Iranian state-owned outlet Press TV, Mohammad Moazzeni, head of Shiraz University in the southern region of Fars, announced the decision during a gathering of students and professors on Monday as a gesture of “solidarity”.

“Students and even professors who have been expelled or threatened with expulsion can continue their studies at Shiraz University and I think that other universities in Shiraz as well as Fars Province are also prepared [to provide the conditions],” Moazzeni reportedly said.

The students, free from the colonising imperialist mentality of Zio-American institutions, can experience the liberatory atmosphere of a society dedicated to Palestinian freedom…and the killing of Jews. Perfect.

It's good that they've apologised, but yes, just a few years ago this was common practice for all those "inclusive" institutions desperate to get their Stonewall or LGBT Youth Scotland certificate of trans idiocy. From the Times:

An independent school has apologised for reporting parents to social workers when they opposed attempts to classify their child as transgender.

George Watson’s College in Edinburgh alerted social services in December 2020 after a long dispute in which the parents, acting on advice from psychologists, asked for the school to adopt a “watchful waiting” approach to their child. This involves closely monitoring a child’s view of their gender without making medical or social interventions, such as changing names or pronouns.

However, the parents say the school insisted on facilitating the child’s wish to identify as a boy. The Times has seen correspondence in which the school said it felt compelled to “share our concerns” with child protection services….

The mother, who has asked to not be named to protect her child’s anonymity, believes the school’s actions were shaped by its adherence to policies supported by LGBT Youth Scotland, which urges teachers to change toilets from mixed sex to gender neutral. The school had received a gold award from the charity for “LGBTQ+ friendliness” in April 2019.

What are the chances, eh? A "decolonization and anti-racism scholar" at a Canadian university thinks Zionists are Nazis:

Brock University has launched a review after a professor praised Hamas’s October 7 atrocities against Israeli civilians, compared the Jewish state to Nazi Germany, and cited antisemitic conspiracy theories in a series of blog posts.

Tamari Kitossa, a decolonization and anti-racism scholar at Brock University, where he heads the critical sociology department, wrote a four-part series written following the Hamas atrocities, which Kitossa describes as “miraculous.” He argues that Zionism and Nazism are one and the same.

“Zionism is a colonial project that intended from the start on lebensraum, a project of ethnic cleansing that preceded the coalition of German industrialists, US bankers and Hitler’s gang of thugs that formed the Third Reich,” writes Kitossa in a blog post on his personal website.

Where do the students get their antisemitism? It's what they're taught.

OUT NOW – 'Blindness: October 7 and the Left', by @HadleyFreeman
Freeman exposes the left's hateful reaction to the events of October 7.
Ready to confront uncomfortable truths?
READ NOW: https://t.co/uePSJ09pHn pic.twitter.com/xiCt0RkBd1

— Jewish Quarterly (@JewishQuarterly) May 2, 2024

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The dangers of leaving private clinics unregulated. GenderGP is run by Helen Webberley and her husband Michael – long term fans of dishing out puberty blockers and hormones virtually on request to troubled teens. From the Times:

A teenager was prescribed “dangerously high” levels of hormones that could have resulted in sudden death, a judge said as he warned of the perils of online transgender treatments.

Sir Andrew McFarlane, the president of the family division of the High Court, said in a ruling on Wednesday that there was “very significant concern” over children “accessing cross-hormone treatment from any offshore, online, unregulated private clinic”.

McFarlane had heard evidence from an expert witness that the dosage of hormones prescribed to the teenager by GenderGP after just a single online consultation with a counsellor was so high it was “highly abnormal and frankly negligent”….

At the heart of the case was a 16-year-old, referred to in the ruling as J, who was born female before beginning a course of cross-hormone treatment at the start of last year.

The autistic teenager is biologically female and has a history of anorexia and self-harm….

It is the latest controversy around the clinic, which was set up in 2015 by Helen Webberley, 54, a doctor from south Wales, and her husband Michael, 57, a former gastroenterologist. It is able to defy NHS guidelines because it is private.

Michael Webberley was struck off in 2022 for “wide-ranging failings” in prescribing hormone treatments to patients as young as nine without proper assessments. One teenager was prescribed testosterone without any consultation of medical records. They took their own life a few months later.

A Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) panel found there had been a “catalogue of failings” in relation to his care of the seven patients between February 2017 and June 2019.

None of this is mentioned on GenderGP’s website, in which he describes himself as “a highly experienced and respected consultant physician of 23 years’ standing.”

Helen Webberley is the public face of GenderGP. She was found to have committed serious misconduct by an MPTS panel in 2022.

Daniel Sugarman – thinking of Amos Oz:

The Telegraph:

Six trustees of a nationwide breastfeeding support group have been suspended for demanding that biological men be excluded from their services.

The British wing of La Leche League (LLL), which gives mother-to-mother support to those finding it hard to breastfeed, has been told by its US-based board of directors that the service cannot be single sex and they must support “male lactation”.

They were also told that the use of the term “mother” could be a “roadblock”, and that questioning gender ideology was “harmful”.

The suspended trustees have now complained to the Charity Commission, saying the charity’s demand that trans women were admitted was against UK law because single-sex places are protected.

Could be interesting.

The Mail:

Britain's oldest breastfeeding charity has called in regulators amid claims of 'harassment and bullying' over a policy to include trans women in meetings.

Directors at La Leche League GB (LLLGB) have requested the Charity Commission intervenes over an inclusivity policy that permits biological males.

The majority of the charity's board of directors have objected to allowing transgender women to be at the gatherings.

Directors have raised concerns that the diktat from the global organisation – based in the US – could mean volunteers are also forced to give advice to trans women wishing to breastfeed….

Meetings are currently female-only and LLLGB's directors have resisted attempts to permit males.

The row has become so heated that it has seen six of the 12 board members sent notices of complaint, threatening them with removal.

A serious incident report has now been sent to the Charity Commission, which will decide whether to investigate.

The report, seen by the Mail, warns of an exodus of volunteers if the charity's international parent body forces the policy on them. It also warned that women in need of support would be put off from attending meetings if trans women were present.

The report read: 'Opening meetings to males (of any gender identity) would exclude a significant number of our beneficiaries i.e. mothers.

'At meetings, they expose their breasts and share intimate experiences. Most are comfortable doing so around other mothers; many will not breastfeed around men, whether for religious reasons, modesty, previous (or current) experience of male violence or 'just' discomfort."

Obviously.

Update: Statement from the concerned LLLGB trustee group defending sex-based rights.

“La Leche League (LLL) has always been about mother-to-mother support to breastfeed. Being able to provide a female-only service is fundamental to the rights, safety and wellbeing of both mothers and babies.

“The volunteers at LLLGB have built a powerful legacy over 50 years, having helped thousands of mothers in a culture that is not always supportive of breastfeeding.

“Pressure to abandon mother-only breastfeeding services has been building internationally at LLL for several years as gender-identity activism has gathered force. We are now at the point that group leaders around the world are being told they must support ‘male lactation’.

“As a group of current trustees of LLLGB, we have exhausted every process available to us to defend sex-based services. LLL International and a small number of fellow trustees at LLLGB have undermined our efforts and left us with no choice but to alert the Charity Commission.

“We would like to reassure group leaders and the mothers who benefit from LLLGB’s services that we are confident the law is on our side, as mother is a sex-based term in UK law.

“Our primary focus is to serve mothers and their children, and we are determined to see through this turbulent time and secure the future of LLLGB as an organisation with mother-to-mother support at its heart.”