) Most of them openly say they support Hamas, a designated terrorist organization;
2) They say 10/7 atrocities, rapes, murders, didn’t happen. The official line is “even the NYT debunked it!”;
3) 10/7 was justified. It was resistance;
4) 100% of the people we spoke to had the exact same narrative and MO, trying to recenter the conversation to 1948, without knowing any of the details when challenged;
5) They have their own security and control access to their encampment;
6) We remained very calm, but they got really aggressive and angry;
7) When you approach people who clearly are junior to others, “handlers” show up very quickly to takeover;
8) Since many of them are truly ignorant about historical and present facts, when they know they’re going to embarrass themselves, they all say “read our 5 demands to divest, now I’m going to stop talking to you.”
More organized and orchestrated than I expected. Very sad to see so many young people in a higher education setting being manipulated and brainwashed and totally devoid of critical thinking.
In that Observer interview, Billy Bragg targeted JK Rowling and Julie Bindel as women who are on the wrong side of the trans debate – "it's who they are lined up with". Some nasty right-wing men, it seems, are aware that you can't change sex. For Billy it's a clincher.
Suggesting that silly women who object to men in women’s changing rooms, hospital wards and prisons have joined forces with the hard-Right is ludicrous. Left-wing feminists, such as myself and Rowling, have led the charge against gender ideology because we campaign against rape and domestic violence. For Bragg to bleat about how abortion rights and equal marriage are at risk as a result of these imagined alliances is a bit rich considering that he, as a straight man, needs neither.
Bragg doesn’t like the powerful, Right-wing men who agree with me and Rowling on the trans issue. The inconvenient truth is that neither Donald Trump nor Viktor Orbán would be au fait with feminist politics, but are each aware that there are only two sexes. If to Bragg that means I agree with those men, so be it.
Feminists — all women — have been deeply and profoundly betrayed by Left-wing men. They have preened and postured about being such good trans allies while we have been attacked, abused, harassed, libelled and shunned for standing up for women’s rights. They turned a blind eye when lesbians were told by transactivists that we are bigots for excluding men from our dating pool. These men clapped along as we were losing our jobs and reputations, agreeing with the zealots that we just needed to be more kind….
This problem spans many decades and continents. In 1964 Stokely Carmichael, a prominent Black Power activist, was asked about the role of women in the civil rights movement. He replied: “The only position for women in the movement is ‘prone’.” It is precisely because men on both the Left and the Right displayed such misogyny that the Women’s Liberation movement was founded in the Seventies. Bragg is a modern-day Carmichael, and men like him will always put men first, whether they claim to be women or not.
It's like one of those Christo wrap-ups…but this time definitely not for art's sake:
[Image: Hollie Adams/Reuters]
On the covering-up of the Holocaust memorial in Hyde Park:
The Metropolitan Police have denied involvement in the decision to cover up London’s Holocaust memorial to protect it during pro-Palestinian protests.
The memorial in Hyde Park was covered in a blue tarpaulin on Saturday, as tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched from Parliament Square to a rally in Hyde Park.
After the decision to cover the monument was reported, the Metropolitan Police released a statement distancing itself. It said: “The decision to cover the memorial was taken by park authorities, not the police.”…
Lord Mann, the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, described the precaution as “sad but necessary to avoid further offence to the Jewish community”.
He said: “We could take the risk that it would get defaced with the likes of placards and cause additional offence to the Jewish and other communities. It would have been nice if the organisers [of the rally] stopped to pay their own respects at the memorial.”
Well yes, you can see his point, but it's the same approach as the Met takes on the endless anti-Israel marches: tell Jews to stay away, remove the Iranian with his "Hamas are terrorists" banner….in effect, appease the antisemites.
Yad Vashem, the global Holocaust remembrance organisation, called on individuals and organisations not to hide the memory of the atrocity.
It said: “Holocaust memorials serve as solemn reminders of the unparalleled horrors perpetrated, during one of the darkest chapters in human history. They stand as testaments to the millions of innocent lives lost and are beacons of hope so that such atrocities cannot and will never be allowed to occur once more.
“The decision to cover up Holocaust memorials and exhibitions out of fear from the scourge of global antisemitism is deeply troubling. By concealing these historical reminders, we are only addressing the symptoms while ignoring the root cause of the issue.
Yad Vashem implores authorities to address the heart of the events: hatred and antisemitism. These are the true issues that are eating away at the moral fabric of our society.”
It's an insult to the memory of the Holocaust, and an admission of what's really going on with these marches.
A social worker who was suspended over her gender critical views has been awarded almost £58,000 in damages from Westminster city council and Social Work England.
In what lawyers described as an unprecedented move by a court to award exemplary damages against a regulator, an employment tribunal called for both the council and the watchdog to train their staff in the principles of freedom of speech.
Rachel Meade, the social worker, said she was “delighted with such a positive judgement after a such a long and dreadful experience. It’s been a hard fight, but I feel relieved and liberated that justice and freedom of speech has prevailed.”
Meade, from Dartford, Kent, had sued the council and Social Work England in 2022 for harassment and sex discrimination after she was suspended over her belief that a person “cannot change their sex”.
Meade was given a one-year warning by case examiners at Social Work England after the regulator received a complaint from a member of the public in 2020 about posts that she had shared or liked on Facebook. The council then suspended her on charges of gross misconduct before giving her a final written warning….
Awarding the damages, the tribunal judge, Richard Nicolle, said that Social Work England’s actions constituted a “serious abuse of its power as a regulatory body”….
As well has making the damages award, the tribunal recommended that the council act within six months to ensure “that all of its managers and human resources staff receive training on freedom of expression and protected belief”.
Exemplary damages are awarded to punish conduct that is "oppressive, arbitrary or unconstitutional".
They are rare. The Legal Feminists are not aware of any other case in which exemplary damages have been awarded against a regulator.
Explaining the award, the tribunal said that SWE had "allowed its processes to be subverted to punish and suppress the Claimant's lawful political speech".
Both respondents must also pay aggravated damages.
Aggravated damages are awarded when a party has behaved in a "high-handed, malicious, insulting or oppressive manner" in committing the act of discrimination….
This comment by @billybragg perfectly sums up what left wing women have taken from left wing men over the last few years. The problem isn’t whether Julie Bindel and I are correct on the issues, but that certain right-wingers agree with us.
If you’ve spent any time at all on the left of politics, you’re familiar with the progressive male class warrior, usually middle-class himself, whose interest in women’s issues begins and ends with sex work, stripping and abortions. He might claim to be a feminist ally and mutter vaguely about ‘equality’ if the need arises, but when a genuine assault on women’s rights erupted under his nose, he cut left wing women adrift without a second thought. He expected us to be so blindly tribal that we’d surrender single sex spaces, jettison the very language we use to describe ourselves, give up fair sport, agree rapists should be locked up in women’s prisons and that lesbians are bigots for not wanting to sleep with the penis-ed, because (horrors!) some people on the right thought these things were wrong, too.
Over the last few years, a huge number of PMCWs have become men’s rights activists in all but name, and it’s been profoundly depressing, if not entirely unexpected, to see how enjoyable they’ve found it. Even while attacking women for finding themselves on the same side as right-wingers, the PMCWs stampeded to join the team that was threatening women with rape and violence, harassing women’s conferences, attempting to block access to gender critical events and physically assaulting female demonstrators. PMCWs are everywhere online, lecturing women reliant on state-run services for not welcoming the male-bodied into communal changing rooms and rape crisis shelters, presuming to police women’s language and tone, turning a blind eye to all statistics on male sexual violence that might contradict the ‘you’re all scaremongering bigots’ narrative and demonstrating that their deepest empathy will always be reserved for those who were born with a penis.
The truth is that the left has fucked up monumentally on gender identity ideology and until it owns the mistake, it will continue to hand the right valid talking points. As more and more PMCWs realise this, they’ll take shameless refuge in accusations that we, the women criticising the injustice and insanity of gender identity ideology, were enabling the far-right. The fact is that they’ve done exactly that, by refusing to accept that there was anything wrong with a movement that was causing serious harm to troubled young people, trampling all over women’s rights and seeking to remove single-sex services for the most vulnerable.
The sense of betrayal women on the left feel towards men like Bragg will take a long time to disappear, if it ever does. I think we all take some grim satisfaction, though, in the fact that evidence of the PMCWs’ misogyny and complicity is a matter of public record, because the panicky back-pedalling and whitewashing that’s just begun is quite something to behold.
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 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
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?
Mick Hartley 