Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Singer Tower

    New York, 1910. "Singer Tower from Liberty and Nassau streets."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

    The world's tallest building from 1908 to 1909, when it was surpassed by the Metropolitan Life tower. Controversially demolished in 1967, to make way for One Liberty Plaza.

  • Israel’s optics problems

    It's often suggested that Israel just needs to do a better job of presenting its case to the world. The problem, as Richard Hanania argues in Tablet, goes a lot deeper than that:

    If one believes that Israel’s optics problems in the current war are the result of flawed public relations, consider how the nation was treated before it began. The U.N. General Assembly adopted 140 resolutions on Israel between 2015 and 2022, about twice as many as on the rest of the world combined. Since 2006, the U.N. Human Rights Council has likewise adopted more resolutions on Israel than on Syria, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela put together….

    Left-wing academics, of course, consider Israel a settler-colonial outpost, as part of a larger narrative that centers an oppressed-oppressor framework for understanding practically all social and political issues. Religious conservatives in the Muslim world see Jews as their ancient enemies, while even secular ideologies like Nasserism and Baathism have found it psychologically and politically convenient to blame Israel for the backwardness of the Arab world and its inability to adapt to modernity. Similarly, demagogues across poor nations have always found it useful to scapegoat the West for their problems, and the history of antisemitism gives them a prepackaged narrative about one particular group having a uniquely pernicious influence on world history.

    Those who think that the problems Israel is facing result from a flawed diplomatic approach should spend some time thinking about how Hamas presents itself and its ultimate aims. One reason that the atrocities of Oct. 7 are undeniable is that Hamas fighters wore GoPros as they slaughtered innocent women and children. Spokesmen for the organization have justified the entirety of its rule by pointing to the “success” of that day and admit that its ultimate goal remains the elimination of Israel. There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that Hamas’ hatred for Israel is intractable, and in this posture it has the support of most Palestinians. This means that Israel finds itself picking from a menu of tragic choices, yet all this is ignored because it does not fit into the anti-Western, Third Worldist, or antisemitic narratives most of the international community is committed to for one reason or another.

    These are forces beyond the ability of any spokesman of the IDF to control or, I’d argue, significantly influence. The idea that Israel just needs better PR is adjacent to the argument that what matters is not so much spin but objective Israeli behavior. Here again, one must consider international opinion over the last several decades. Before this current war, Israel had killed fewer Palestinians in a half century of periodic hostilities than the number of civilians the United States and its allies killed during the war on ISIS alone. The number of deaths in the Syrian civil war has of course been several orders of magnitude higher than that. It would be superfluous to continue providing examples of a double standard at work, as anyone with the most basic historical understanding could go on for a very long time listing post-World War II atrocities the U.N. and the global community have all but ignored as they have sanctioned and lectured Israel.

    All this leads to the question of what allies of Israel should be doing instead of demanding better public relations.

    Well, for a start they can refuse to accept the false premise of moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas, as exemplified in the latest International Criminal Court arrest warrant applications for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas's leader Yahya Sinwar for war crimes.

    A nation defending itself and inflicting collateral damage is not the same as a movement with exterminationist goals, which seeks to slaughter innocent people as an end in itself.

  • At the International Conference on Nuclear Security

    Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi leads a minute of silence for Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Abdollahian. Grossi referred to the "tragic news" of the incident. He made his remarks at the opening plenary at the International Conference on Nuclear Security.

    "Before we start with our work, important work for this week, we are all aware of the tragic news from the weekend, and I want to address my dear friend, the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ambassador Najafi, to invite the whole [audience] to join me in observance of a minute of silence in honor of the late President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Dr. Ebrahim Raisi, the Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and other members of their delegation who passed away tragically yesterday, after an accident. So please join me in observing a minute of silence."

  • The BBC and Gaza

    Danny Cohen, a former BBC Television director, on the BBC's Gaza coverage:

    The BBC’s royal charter sets out five “public purposes”, the very first of which is a commitment to impartiality. Yet the Israel-Hamas war has seen the BBC fail to deliver on this crucial test on more occasions than can be explained away as “errors” or bad luck.

    A source of repeated issues over impartiality is BBC Arabic. Since the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, BBC Arabic has been forced to make 80 corrections to its reporting. Something is going badly wrong. Mistakes don’t happen 80 times.

    The failures of impartiality have included BBC reporters describing Hamas terrorists as “the resistance”, as well as labelling attacks which targeted and killed civilians as “resistance operations”. It’s the language you would hear from a Hamas spokesman.

    The corporation was forced to remove an episode of the BBC Arabic programme Trending, which questioned whether the Kfar Aza kibbutz massacre on October 7 actually happened. This plays into an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that seeks to undermine the terrible truth of what happened that day. How was a video of that nature produced and distributed by the BBC in the first place? How is it possible that editorial standards at BBC Arabic had fallen so low that this was seen as legitimate reporting?

    There is plenty more. Last month a BBC Arabic presenter asked an Egyptian guest to apologise for expressing sympathy for Israel. One BBC Arabic journalist interviewed a Palestinian woman about her life amid the conflict but decided it was not relevant to ask her directly about the time she stabbed an Israeli neighbour in front of her children.

    There is no sign that this blatant lack of impartiality at BBC Arabic will be dealt with any time soon by senior management. Yet this is not even the worst of it. The BBC continues to employ people who actually celebrated the October 7 terrorist attacks….

    When breaches of impartiality are so egregious that they extend to the exaltation of a massacre, something has gone very wrong with the public broadcaster. But these scandals are made so much worse when the organisation fails to deal effectively with the problem.

    Indeed, far from publicly recognising the scale of this issue, the BBC has gone out of its way to support and endorse its Arabic service. Director-general Tim Davie has recently stated his admiration for BBC Arabic, saying that the service was something “we should be very proud of”.

    On taking the role of director-general, Davie chose to put impartiality at the heart of his tenure, describing it as his “number one priority”. Given the actions of BBC Arabic over the past seven months, it now seems clear that, unfortunately, he has failed in his mission in the most shameful way possible.

    And this morning's lead story on BBC News – Gazans ‘shackled and blindfolded’ at Israel hospital, from Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson. 

    Of relevance here, a story I posted on back in December from this same Lucy Williamson, of the eighteen-year-old Mohammed Nazzal, who claimed he'd been badly beaten, with bones in both hands broken by brutal warders in an Israeli jail where he'd been held without charge. Williamson interviewed the lad in Gaza, heavily bandaged hands on his lap, surrounded by his family, and believed every word. The fact that the Israel Prison Service released a video clearly showing an uninjured Nazzal, unbandaged hands by his side, happily climbing into a Red Cross bus on his release, made no difference to Williamson's breathless report. Everything that the Palestinians/Hamas say must be true, while the duplicitous Jews are always lying.

    So no, I don't know about this latest story, but given Lucy Williamson's record I'm not exactly convinced…

  • Raisi’s “mixed legacy”

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  • Eli Copter

    From the JC:

    A news presenter for a French-Israeli TV channel has been ridiculed online for reporting a Telegram joke about a Mossad agent called ‘Eli Kopter’. 

    Daniel Haik, a political analyst for i24 Francais, the French language version of i24, an international 24-hour news channel based in Israel was being interviewed last night after Iran’s president was killed in a helicopter crash.

    During a live segment updating on the crash, Haik quoted a Telegram channel saying: “The pilot was a Mossad agent with the name ‘Eli Copter’, it’s not currently clear whether this is true or not, but that’s the rumour going around.” 

    Haik was ridiculed for not recognising the joke, which also works in French as the word for helicopter is the same as in English.

    The Eli Copter joke, which is thought to have originated on Twitter/x and was spread on Israeli Whatsapp groups, last night and later reported as fact on Hamas channels on Telegram.

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  • The crime of being raped

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    Atefeh was convicted for crimes against chastity after being raped repeatedly by Ali Darabi, an 51-year-old ex-revolutionary guard turned taxi driver. Darabi was a married man with children at the time.

    Atefeh had been raped by Darabi over a period of 3 years without her family being aware. While in prison, she was further allegedly tortured and raped by prison guards. She told her grandmother that she could only walk on all fours because of the pain. The judge in her case was Haji Rezai. When Atefah realized that she was losing her case, she removed her hijab, an act seen as a severe contempt of the court, and argued that Ali Darabi should be punished, not her. She even removed her shoes and threw them at the judge. Rezai later sentenced her to death.

    According to the BBC, the documents presented to the Supreme Court of Appeal described her as 22 years old, but her birth certificate and death certificate stated that she was 16.

  • Enabling damage to women

    More on the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre ruling, from Joan Smith at UnHerd:

    If you’re trying to get away with a lie, it had better be a big one. It’s something populist politicians understand very well, firing up supporters with outrageous claims designed to encourage their preexisting prejudices. One of the biggest, which is shamefully popular on the Left in this country, is the idea that there’s no conflict between women’s rights and the demands of identity politics.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. Women are having to dismantle the lie brick by brick, using the courts to show how individuals have been ostracised by colleagues and lost jobs. But the latest in a series of harrowing employment tribunal cases demonstrates not just the damage to a particular claimant, but the devastating impact of gender ideology on victims of sexual violence.

    It shows how even women who have been raped, who are so traumatised they can barely speak about their experience, are of little account to a movement that prioritises men over women. The tribunal found that the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre constructively dismissed and harassed an employee, Roz Adams, after she realised that senior managers believed there is no such thing as biological sex, and expressed her concerns about the effect of that belief on traumatised women.

    Of course this happened in Scotland, where gender ideology is so embedded that the CEO of the centre is a trans-identified man. Mridul Wadhwa wasted no time in demonstrating his unsuitability for the job, suggesting in a notorious interview in 2021 that “bigoted” rape survivors should be re-educated about trans rights. But the full extent of his influence on the culture of the centre is exposed in the tribunal’s excoriating judgment.

    It found that Wadhwa and other members of the senior management team were on a “heresy hunt” when they began a disciplinary process against Adams. It concluded that Wadhwa’s intention was to “cleanse the organisation” of anyone who refused to accept views which were “at the very extreme end of gender identity theory”….

    The centre even refused to refer rape survivors who wanted a female counsellor to a women-only service set up by J.K. Rowling. This is about as far from a victim-centred approach as it is possible to imagine, turning what should have been a service for distressed women into an exercise to validate the fantasies of entitled men like Wadhwa.

    No woman, not even one who has been terrorised and beaten by a violent sex offender, is safe from the demands of these misogynists. They have got away with it because too many people have swallowed the big lie that men who “identify” as women are victims who need to be cosseted. Anyone who goes on believing it, after it’s been exposed so many times, is enabling damage to women.

    This would be bad enough anywhere, but that this trans takeover should happen at a rape crisis centre for god's sake -  it defies belief.

    Last word:

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  • The “protector of resistance movements”

    So farewell then, the Butcher of Tehran:

    The Islamic Republic's terror proxies Hamas and Hezbollah issued statements mourning Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday.

    Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and other officials were also killed in the crash in the country’s northwestern East Azerbaijan province.

    “These leaders supported the legitimate struggle of our people against the Zionist entity, provided valued support to the Palestinian resistance, and made tireless efforts in solidarity and support in all forums and fields for our people in the steadfast Gaza Strip during the Battle of Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas said, referring to the war it launched on October  7 when it led an assault on the northwestern Negev, killing, wounding and kidnapping thousands of civilians and soldiers.

    “They also made significant political and diplomatic efforts to stop the Zionist aggression against our Palestinian people,” the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate with close ties to the regime in Tehran added.

    Hezbollah, Iran's terrorist proxy in Lebanon, eulogized Raisi as a "protector of resistance movements."

    “Hezbollah in Lebanon extends its deepest condolences,” the group said, adding that the Iranian president was “a strong supporter, and a staunch defender of our causes … and a protector of the resistance movements.”

    Raisi, known as the “Butcher of Tehran” for his role in the 1988 executions of 30,000 political prisoners, was elected president in 2021. The hardline leader has repeatedly called for the destruction of the State of Israel.

    I trust the various Free Palestine student encampments will pause for a minute's silence in honour of the great man, who so ably embodied, and gave voice to, their own sentiments on the matter of the Zionist entity.

    Israel has denied involvement – though I doubt it'll make much difference to the inevitable accusations.

  • Changing gender under Labour

    Meanwhile, Labour keeps digging away at that trans hole. Clearly Anneliese Dodds learned nothing from her recent meeting with the LRB Alliance:

    Labour will make it easier to change gender and is considering allowing a single family doctor to sign off on the decision under plans to “simplify” the process.

    The party is considering how to make the legally binding certificate easier to obtain while still having guardrails to prevent mirroring controversial ­proposals in Scotland that would have ­removed doctors from the process ­altogether.

    The plans include ditching a panel of doctors and lawyers that approve ­gender recognition certificates, the document allowing transgender people to have their affirmed gender legally recognised, and only requiring one doctor to be involved in the process.

    The Times understands that one option under consideration is that the doctor could be a GP. Labour would ­also ­remove the ability of a spouse to object to the change. A source said the party wanted to make the process “less medicalised” but added that the plans would retain the involvement of a doctor and would not allow people to self-identify in order to obtain legal changes….

    Anneliese Dodds, the shadow women and equalities secretary, said she wanted to strip out the “futile and dehumanising parts” of acquiring a gender recognition certificate.

    “We believe everyone should be treated with dignity and respect,” she said. “We want to see the process for gender recognition modernised, while protecting single sex spaces for biological women. This means stripping out the futile and dehumanising parts of the process for obtaining a gender ­recognition certificate, while retaining important safeguards.”

    Making self-ID easier, with the fig-leaf of a GP's approval, is back to the bad old days, following along the SNP's disastrous path. What on earth are they thinking?

    And the bit about "while protecting single sex spaces for biological women" is window-dressing nonsense. Easier self-ID and protecting single sex spaces are simply not compatible.

    Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said she would be concerned about “shifting sole responsibility for signing gender recognition certificates to GPs”.

    She said while the college supported improving care for patients with gender dysphoria “including tackling the long waits they face for treatment and ­services”, she added: “For most GPs, detailed management of gender dysphoria is outside of our area of expertise.”

    Badenoch said: “There is no reason whatsoever to relax the safeguards that are in place. [Labour] should stop trying to weaponise this issue and allow professionals to do their job properly.”