Mick Hartley

Here's the trailer:

See the full film here.

From the JC:

A documentary about the rape and sexual crimes committed by Hamas terrorists on and after the October 7 massacre has been published online to watch for free.

The film, entitled Screams Before Silence and featuring eye-witness testimonies from survivors, accounts from first responders, and interrogation footage of members of Hamas, provides considerable evidence for a campaign of systematic rape by the terror group during its devastating assault on southern Israel six months ago.

The documentary is fronted by former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg who in the film returns to kibbutzim that were targeted on October 7 with former residents to hear in heart-wrenching detail what happened to them that morning.

Sandberg also travels to the site of the Nova music festival massacre, which is now scattered with hundreds of newly planted trees, Israeli flags, and the pictures of all those murdered.

Between footage filmed by both Nova festival survivors and Hamas, first responders to the massacre tell Sandberg harrowing accounts of what they witnessed when arriving.

“Everywhere we go there are bodies on the road, there are bodies everywhere, everywhere. It’s an indescribable catastrophe,” one responder said.

A volunteer at ZAKA (Disaster victim identification) said that despite being trained to collect body parts and bodies in hard situations, he “doesn’t have words to explain what we saw.” They found mutilated bodies “cut to pieces, you couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman, everything was ripped,” he said, and many bodies were naked.

One woman was found by ZAKA inside a home, under a mattress, with “nails around her female organs… She’s a woman so you could do whatever you want.”

Another reasoned: “When you see one woman, then another, and another, all with signs of abuse in the groin area, you understand that this wasn’t a random thing.”

The Times of Israel:

The hour-long film, created in cooperation with Israel’s Kastina Productions, provides first-hand accounts from survivors, freed hostages, first responders, and legal, medical, and forensic experts. Sandberg is present throughout the film either interviewing individuals in a studio or accompanying them to October 7-related sites.

What emerges is not only an understanding of the mass scale and barbarism of Hamas’s sexual attacks against women but also their deliberate, pre-meditated, and systematic nature.

“When the body of the woman is violated, it symbolizes [the violation] of the body of the whole nation,” Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, former vice-president of the United Nations Commission on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, says in the documentary.

The film’s testimonies detail a horrific truth that was largely brushed aside by a report released earlier this week by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in which he declined to include Hamas among organizations suspected by the UN of committing acts of sexual violence during conflict. That report noted there is evidence that sex crimes were committed during the Palestinian terror group’s devastating October 7 attack on Israel, but did not specifically attribute responsibility to Hamas.

Transgenderism's most impressive feat was convincing a significant percentage of society that men attempting to coerce and manipulate women into sex they don't want is somehow "a sign of the changing times" when it's actually a tale as old as time. pic.twitter.com/3BjD0fCAta

— The Heretical Liberal 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@Rob_ThaBuilder) April 27, 2024

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Welcome news from the Telegraph:

The NHS is to crack down on transgender ideology in hospitals, with terms like “chestfeeding” set to be banned.

Victoria Atkins, the Health Secretary, will this week announce a series of changes to the NHS constitution which sets out patients’ rights.

Referring to “people who have ovaries” rather than “women” will also be prohibited under plans to ensure hospitals use clear language based on biological sex.

The new constitution will ban transgender women from being treated on single-sex female hospital wards to ensure women and girls receive “privacy and protection” in hospitals.

Patients will also be given the right to request that intimate care is carried out by someone of the same biological sex….

Kemi Badenoch, the women and equalities minister, has backed calls for a public inquiry into the “pervasive influence” of transgender ideology in the NHS.

The new NHS constitution will emphasise the importance of using “sex-specific” language in the health service after references to women were expunged from advice on the menopause and diseases such as cervical and ovarian cancer.

Excellent. Though future generations may wonder how we ever got ourselves into this mess in the first place.

Susie Linfield wrote about The return of the progressive atrocity last November, in response to the left's embrace of Hamas after the Oct 7th pogrom, which she characterised as "a kind of moral rot". She's now interviewed by Robert Boyers in Salgamundi, again on the left's persistent determination to misread the situation in Gaza. On the grotesque attempts, for instance, to compare Israel to Nazis, and Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto:

Do I really have to delineate the differences between the Warsaw, Lodz, and other ghettos under Nazis supervision and the situation in Gaza before the war? Good lord. Well, for a start: Jews—who, of course, had never attacked Germany, Poland, or any other country—were herded into those Eastern European ghettos to be beaten, starved, tortured, terrorized, and murdered in large numbers in preparation for the remnants being deported to the death camps. Gaza is a mini-state run by Hamas, a well-armed, well-financed terror group that has built an enormous underground city for the express, and only, purpose of storing enormous quantities of military equipment with which to attack Israel. Before this war, the streets of Gaza were patrolled by Hamas, not Israel. Gazans are the recipients of massive amounts in international aid—and Hamas receives enormous sums from Qatar and Iran. So far as I know, no one was aiding the Jews in the ghettos. Gazan women have traditionally had a relatively high fertility rate. None of this sounds too much like Jewish life under the Nazis. Most of all: The Nazis aimed to kill every Jew in the world. That has nothing to do with the Zionist project, even in its most brutal and reactionary iterations.   

Should I go on?…

Gaza, even before the war, was a very bad place. And more important: It was a politically hopeless place. That is what is so devastating, and so dangerous. But it has attained an almost mythological status in much of the world’s imagination—the ninth circle of hell, so to speak. It was not “like a Jewish ghetto” in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, as Gessen charges, and it was not a “concentration camp,” as some have even more egregiously charged. In a recent report in the New Yorker, David Remnick quotes Mustafa Barghouti, a West Bank politician, castigating the destruction that Israel is causing to Gaza’s “cities, mosques and universities, schools and courts and hospitals.” Does this sound like the Warsaw Ghetto, or Treblinka? Far from being completely isolated from the world, Gazans have an entire United Nations agency, consisting of 13,000 workers for a population of two million, devoted to their health and education—which Syrian, and South Sudanese, and Rohingyan, and millions of other refugees definitely do not. Numerous humanitarian organizations worked there. It had apartment buildings, restaurants, shops, pharmacies. The charge of “liquidation” is also hyperbole. Palestinian casualties in the current war are staggeringly high. But there will eventually be a ceasefire, and Gaza will still be one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Virtually all the Jews in the Nazi ghettos were murdered; that’s liquidation. I feel angry, and somehow degraded, at having to address these specious, grotesque comparisons. Again: The Israelis aren’t Nazis, and the Hamas aren’t Nazis. There’s a kind of repetition compulsion at work here. Can we please put the Nazi metaphors to rest?

Worth reading in full.

The "debate" over trans women (men) competing against women continues to rumble on, despite the obvious fact which everyone knows: that men have an inbuilt biological advantage over women in sport which no amount of messing around with testosterone level tests can disguise. It's perhaps the clearest indication in the whole trans debate of how ideology can warp minds – can blind "be kind" people to the bleeding obvious. These trans athletes are not so much poor victims being denied their right to compete as mostly sociopathic men who see the chance to win stuff which they wouldn't have a hope of winning against other men, and care not one tiny jot for the women athletes they defeat so easily.

From the NYT this week, on what they like to call "the unsettled and fractious debate about bans on transgender athletes":

A new study financed by the International Olympic Committee found that transgender female athletes showed greater handgrip strength — an indicator of overall muscle strength — but lower jumping ability, lung function and relative cardiovascular fitness compared with women whose gender was assigned female at birth.

That data, which also compared trans women with men, contradicted a broad claim often made by proponents of rules that bar transgender women from competing in women’s sports. It also led the study’s authors to caution against a rush to expand such policies, which already bar transgender athletes from a handful of Olympic sports.

The study’s most important finding, according to one of its authors, Yannis Pitsiladis, a member of the I.O.C.’s medical and scientific commission, was that, given physiological differences, “Trans women are not biological men.”

Eh?? Then what the fuck are they? This is obfuscatory nonsense.

Joan Smith at UnHerd:

It’s one of those unfathomable mysteries. Generations of athletes have been segregated by sex, with men’s times consistently faster than the women’s. Now it turns out that the whole thing was unnecessary, because a new study suggests that a bunch of unfit men don’t have much advantage over women who exercise regularly. I mean, really?…

One can almost hear the palpable sigh of relief at the paper, which has otherwise gone a bit terfy since the publication of the Cass Report. The study’s most important finding, the newspaper announces, is that “trans women are not biological men.”

Cathy Devine, who was senior lecturer in sport and physical activity at the University of Cumbria for more than two decades, was caustic on X. “This study compared unfit, overweight trans women (males) to fit females,” she wrote. Sports scientist Tommy Kundberg previously explained that “the cohorts are not matched and the main comparison is between fit/trained reference women and unfit transgender women.”…

It’s all a distraction from the obvious fact that men are bigger and stronger than women. Men are on average 13 cm, or five inches, taller and their skeletons are visibly different, which is how archaeologists are able to identify the sex of people who lived thousands of years ago. The difference can’t be hidden in photographs of medal ceremonies, where six-foot-something men tower over the women they’ve just beaten in manifestly unfair competition.

At a moment when the gender ideology juggernaut is in retreat, the New York Times tuts over the number of “outright bans” on transgender athletes in the US. These “bans” do not exist, except in the fevered imaginations of trans activists who regard a return to time-honoured practice — separate sports categories for men and women — as unspeakably “transphobic”.

With the Olympic Games on the horizon in Paris, the stakes could not be higher. Mediocre male athletes realised some time ago that previously unattainable success was within their grasp, if only they could compete against women rather than the world’s fastest men. They throw tantrums when they’re not allowed to impose their delusions on the rest of us, but they have an insurmountable problem. No research can blind us to the evidence of our own eyes.

Lionel Shriver in the Spectator.

Following the release of the Cass report deprecating NHS ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors as reliant on rubbish medical research, the number of comment pieces disparaging the cult of transgenderism has exploded. Such columns would never have been published even a couple of years ago. Finally, pushing disturbed children and adolescents into damaging and sometimes gruesome treatment in the service of adult fanaticism is starting to look, um – iffy. For outliers who’ve been frantically signalling, ‘Hey! Maybe a society that’s mutilating its own kids has lost its way!’ this watershed should constitute satisfying vindication. It does. That’s the good news.

The bad news: the lie that you can choose to be whichever sex you feel like is entrenched in Britain’s school system. Activist teachers who’ve blithely ignored cautious government guidance aren’t likely to drop their warped ‘genderbread’ lesson plans or their exciting collusion with children against their own parents merely because of a spot of bad press. The fashion for sexually neutral language that gave us ‘birthing people’ and ‘bonus holes’ is embedded in the NHS, the media and many charities, and these dehumanising linguistic abortions won’t likely evaporate overnight….

For the past decade or so, the cultural glorification of what was once sensibly characterised as a rare mental illness has displayed all the hallmarks of an irrational social mania. The fact that we all got the message from the off that if we’re not on board with this stuff we’d better keep our mouths shut is a red flag. Proper manias sweep virtually everyone up in their whirlwinds, and woe to anyone who clings to reality as if clutching a signpost in a gale. Social hysteria does not permit dissent. Those few who refuse to get with the programme will pay the price with exile, opprobrium and professional disgrace – if not, amid the very worst of our communal insanities, with prison or death. We like to think of ourselves as unique individuals, but in a crowd we’re a hive species.

Also:

The age of mania 24 mins:

For middle and upper middle class parents having a trans kid was a “designer handbag”… a gay kid was a passé… a little bit disappointing

Homophobia – internal and extend is at the heart of gender ideology

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— Hassan Mamdani (@HassanMamdani) April 24, 2024

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"Baltimore waterfront and skyline." Circa 1912.

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Co.]

A skyline dominated by the Emerson Tower on the left, better known as the Bromo-Seltzer Tower, surmounted by a giant, 20-ton Bromo bottle.

It's not as bad here as it is on US campuses, but it's still bad. In the Times – Jewish students at UCL say they are facing rising antisemitism:

When [Romilly] Blitz posted on social media in the hours after the attack about rapes perpetrated by Hamas, a classmate said that she was “clearly racist and Islamophobic” given her lack of focus on Palestinian victims.

As pro-Palestinian protests began on campus, a tearful Blitz decided to leave. Waiting to be picked up by her mother, her sense of anger erupted when a demonstrator walked past with a sign reading “Free Palestine — this is justice”.

Blitz, a history and politics student, returned to campus two weeks later from her family home only to soon find herself at the centre of what her mother described as a “whispering campaign”.

The student, who is not an Israeli national, sought to challenge some of the opinions that were proliferating about events in the Middle East, putting forward her perspective as a Jew. In response, she was referred to as a “psychopathic genocidal Israeli” who had been “brainwashed by Zionist propaganda”.

She said: “Things just really got spun so when I would go to classes people would boo me, people would not move, I’d have to sit on the floor at the back if there were no seats because people were so rude.”

Yep… antisemitism.

Photographer Jamie McGregor Smith has been visiting brutalist and modernist churches across Europe for his book Sacred Modernity: The Holy Embrace of Modernist Architecture.

From Dezeen:

The churches in Sacred Modernity have sculptural concrete forms that break away from the mould of conventional churches, which typically have a floor plan in the shape of a cross.

McGregor Smith claimed this was part of a trend after the second world war, which sought new styles separated from traditional architecture of the past.

"While traditional churches evoke a sense of familiarity and reverence through their classic designs, brutalist and modernist churches challenge these norms with their bold, austere and provocative aesthetic," he said.

"These architectural styles emerged in the post-war period as a rejection of the past's orthodoxy and a pursuit of a new social order free from associations with opulence, authority and war."

L'église Saint-Nicolas in Switzerland

Chiesa di Santa Maria Immacolata in Italy

The Wotruba Church in Vienna, Austria

St Matthew's Church, Birmingham, UK

Tempio Mariano di Monte Grisa in Italy

St Reinold Kirche in Düsseldorf, Germany

Santuario della Beata Vergine della Consolazione in San Marino, Italy

St Mauritius Kirche in Munich, Germany

St Paulus Kirche in Neuss-Weckhoven, Germany

St Matthäus Kirche in Düsseldorf, Germany

Chiesa di San Nicolao della Flue in Milan, Italy

Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione in Rome, Italy

L'église Saint-Nicolas in Heremence, Switzerland

Cathedral Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Bristol, UK

Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche in Vienna, Austria

Kościół świętego Dominika in Warsaw, Poland
[All images © Jamie McGregor Smith]

Well well – in the Guardian, no less. David Bell – The Cass review of gender identity services marks a return to reason and evidence – it must be defended:

The policy of “affirmation” – that is, speedily agreeing with a child that they are of the wrong gender – was an inappropriate clinical stance brought about by influential activist groups and some senior gender identity development service (Gids) staff, resulting in a distortion of the clinical domain. Studies indicate that a majority of children in the absence of medical intervention will desist – that is, change their minds.

The many complex problems that affect these young people were left unaddressed once they were viewed simplistically through the prism of gender. Cass helpfully calls this “diagnostic overshadowing”. Thus children suffered thrice over: through not having all their problems properly addressed; by being put on a pathway for which there is not adequate evidence and for which there is considerable risk of harm; and lastly because children not unreasonably believed that all their problems would disappear once they transitioned. It is, I think, not possible for a child in acute states of torment to be able to think through consequences of a future medical transition. Children struggle to even imagine themselves in an adult sexual body….

Characterising a child as “being transgender” is harmful as it forecloses the situation and also implies that this is a unitary condition for which there is unitary “treatment”. It is much more helpful to use a description: that the child suffers from distress in relation to gender/sexuality, and this needs to be carefully explored in terms of the narrative of their lives, the presence of other difficulties such as autism, depression, histories of abuse and trauma, and confusion about sexuality. As the Cass report notes, studies suggest that a high proportion of these children are same-sex attracted, and many suffer from homophobia. Concerned gay and lesbian clinicians have said they experienced homophobia in the service, and that staff worked in a “climate of fear”….

Those who say a child has been “born in the wrong body”, and who have sidelined child safeguarding, bear a very heavy responsibility. Parents have been asked “Do you want a happy little girl or a dead little boy?” Cass notes that rates of suicidality are similar to rates among non-trans identified youth referred to child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). Indeed, the NHS lead for suicide prevention, Prof Sir Louis Appleby, has said “invoking suicide in this debate is mistaken and potentially harmful”….

The pendulum is already swinging towards a reassertion of rationality. Cass’s achievement is to give that pendulum a hugely increased momentum. In years to come we will look back at the damage done to children with incredulity and horror.

At UnHerd they note the Guardian's unfortunate history on trans matters in general, and the Cass review in particular:

A day after the report was released, it published an article by transgender writer Freddy McConnell which criticised Cass for “failing to take on clinicians who doubt the very existence of trans children” and “giv[ing] credence to anti-trans bias”. McConnell’s article was later amended after a previous version suggested that the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel had likened trans adults to Jimmy Savile….

A number of former Guardian writers have since spoken publicly about a culture at the paper which stifled gender-critical views and of staff who bullied women for criticising the Left-of-centre orthodoxy on “gender-affirming care”. Suzanne Moore, who used to be a columnist there, wrote for UnHerd in 2020 about her experience of being ostracised by colleagues for her views on sex differences, while former staff writer Hadley Freeman stressed in an essay that “it’s not bigoted” to stand up for single-sex spaces and the rights of biological women.

Speaking to UnHerd today, Bindel said, “I know how hard David Bell had to try to get the Guardian to agree to him writing an opinion piece, following his complaints about the Freddy McConnell article. I don’t believe for one minute that the Guardian has decided it has been wrong all along on this issue, but its hand has been forced.” Speaking about the newspaper, she went on, “What a monumental mess it’s made of everything, losing decent feminist journalists and readers in order to capitulate to transactivists on staff and contract.”