Mick Hartley

It used to be Saudi Arabia stoking Muslim fervour in the UK and elsewhere. Now it's Iran:

Iran has been blamed for stoking protests outside British schools as a new report reveals its widespread and increasing attempts to impose de facto blasphemy laws in the UK.

A report by Policy Exchange called on MI5 to reinstate “countersubversion operations” in a bid to tackle the growing threat from Tehran.

The think tank links a series of recent protests condemning acts of blasphemy to the growing influence of the Iranian regime on British Muslims.

It claimed the Islamic Centre of England (ICE), which is run by a direct representative of Iran’s supreme leader, was the “nerve centre” of Iran’s presence in the UK.

It said Iran uses the ICE and other institutions across the UK to project soft power and influence, with increasing numbers of Iranian clerics moving to Britain to spread Tehran’s strand of Islam.

Policy Exchange also uncovered figures revealing that the UK has granted 100 visas to Iranian religious figures since 2005, with 21 of them issued to clerics who are trained by and must remain loyal to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Home Office denied visas to a further 44 Iranian religious leaders over the same period….

Another example the report gave of Iran’s “ability to stir the pot of religious prejudice within the UK” include the protests that occurred outside Batley Grammar School in 2021, which forced a teacher who had shown his pupils a cartoon of Muhammad into hiding.

It also cited the incident at a school in Wakefield in February last year where four schoolboys were suspended after one of them reportedly scuffed his own copy of the Qur’an.

The three examples “serve as an indication that de facto blasphemy codes can be enforced on the streets if protestors commit to doing so,” the report said.

And if the police and local authorities are too scared to take any action.

The report is here.

How young North Koreans continue to defy the regime:

Despite heavy crackdowns by North Korean authorities on the viewing of South Korean media, young people are finding various ways to continue watching it under the noses of the government.

“Enforcers from the Sinuiju Task Force against Anti-Socialist and Non-Socialist Behavior have been closely watching for signs of illegal video viewing, conducting two or three searches of residents’ homes every day. But young people are using notetels to avoid detection when watching illegal media,” a source in North Pyongan Province told Daily NK on Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Notetel, short for “notebook television,” is a Chinese-made portable media player that is widely used in North Korea. One feature of notetels is that they can play a wide range of media files stored on compact discs (CDs), SD cards and USB flash drives.

This has inspired young people to keep a CD of legal movies or dramas in the drive while watching illegal media on an SD card or USB flash drive. They store illegal media on SD cards or USB flash drives because they are smaller and easier to remove and conceal than a CD.

When someone knocks on the door, the teens quickly remove the SD card or USB flash drive and immediately play the legal media on the CD in the drive so it looks like they were watching it all along, the source explained.

This was the method used by a young man in Sinuiju to fool enforcers who paid him an unexpected visit on March 30 while he was watching a South Korean movie.

According to the source, the young man removed the USB flash drive from his notebook as soon as he heard a knock at his door. After hiding the flash drive, he opened the door.

Enforcement officers checked the CD in his notebook for illegal media and then opened all the drawers in the house to look for storage devices that might contain illegal videos. When nothing objectionable was found, they left the house.

“When you ask who is at the door, the enforcers do not identify themselves, they just ask people to open up. So now people are in the habit of hiding anything that could get them in trouble if there’s a knock at the door. And that’s exactly what this young man was doing,” the source said.

“The enforcers will search you if they find something suspicious, but otherwise they’ll just move on to the next house. People here [in North Korea] have been dealing with searches since they were born, so they’re smart enough to trick the enforcers. That’s how they get away with watching South Korean dramas and other illegal media,” the source said.

Considering the punishments now for watching "anti-socialist" videos – anything from years in a forced labour camp right up to execution – that takes some courage. But that's the world they live in.

Jack Delano, January 1943. Riverdale, Illinois. "Blue Island Yard of the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad with view of the icing platform."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

At the steps over the Shoreditch railway bridge to Cheshire Street. 

This morning:

And in 1968, taken by John Claridge:

Before the invention of the aerosol spray can.

🚨 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚 🚨

A trans-identified male just dominated the Girls 200m Varsity at the Sherwood Need for Speed Classic in Sherwood, Oregon.

Aayden Gallagher, a boy who "identifies" as a girl, set a new record after easily defeating his female competitors. pic.twitter.com/CWhVFeRXBP

— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) April 13, 2024

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200 metres? He wins by about 50 metres. The girls don't look very motivated, mind. I mean, why bother?

Update: video removed. Try this:

Don’t know if they’ll take this one down. If not, I screen recorded my post on Insta. pic.twitter.com/tY8ZNadQW6

— CJ (@cj_1234_cj) April 15, 2024

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

And Graham Linehan in the Telegraph:

In 2021, I was asked to give evidence to a House of Lords select committee about free speech and trans ideology. I was told the protocol was to read a short statement to lay out my position before taking questions from assorted titled luminaries.

I poured myself into the work of structuring a statement, sustained by the optimism that is a weirdly persistent part of my character – a belief that this moment would finally bring about the breakthrough when people would wake up to what was happening – to free speech, to women’s spaces, but most importantly of all, to children.

I had visions of sitting at that giant rectangular table, being grilled by concerned Right Hons who would immediately Drop Everything in order to Do Something. The air would be heavy with history.

But of course, we were in lockdown, so the event played out on Zoom and looked more like a meeting of general managers discussing toilet provisions. Even worse, when it came to my big speech, I entered into a somewhat unseemly back and forth with one of my hosts.

“Oh, no we’re not doing statements.”

“I was told to prepare one.”

“No, not for this session.”

I persevered, and the vaguely annoyed moderator finally decided to allow it. I won’t stretch your patience with it as I did theirs, but here are some excerpts.

“Almost four years ago, I saw that feminists were being bullied, harassed and silenced for standing up for their rights and their children’s rights. I decided to use my platform on Twitter to bring attention to what seemed to be an all-out assault on women, on their words, their dignity and their safety. Also, I saw that vulnerable children were being fast-tracked onto a medical pathway that carried severe long-term implications.”

And then, further on, trying my best to ignore the glazed-over eyes of my hosts: “If you believe that JK Rowling is transphobic, a woman who has devoted her work and much of her fortune to the vulnerable, the bullied, the forgotten and the abused, then you are under a spell.

“If you believe that men can fairly compete against women in their sports, then you are under a spell.

“If you believe that men will not go to the most extreme lengths to gain access to women and children, then you are under a spell.

“If you believe that children as young as three years old can agree to a procedure that puts them on a medical pathway for life, that arrests their natural puberty, and that has almost no scientific proof as to its efficacy as a treatment for dysphoria, then you are under a spell.”

It did not have the effect I was expecting. “But … but … what can we DO?” was what I had expected to hear, but instead the assembled nobs looked amused and bored, and quickly changed the subject.

This would be something to which I’d soon become accustomed – pointing at the approaching meteorite, only to have everyone stare at my finger. It turned out they were more interested in interrogating my conduct on social media.

I don’t remember many questions about the issues I had raised, and certainly none about what was being done to children in gender clinics across the country.

It was, in hindsight, a perfect microcosm of everything that was to follow. Afterwards, I sat at my desk, dazed, and realised that I might as well have been talking to myself.

It would be three years later, in 2024, that the findings of the Cass Review would vindicate all those men and women, especially women, who had lost friends, family members, work and opportunities, for trying to get the word out about what is now known to be the greatest medical scandal in recent history.

My optimism has taken a beating since then, so I’m reluctant to say this out loud, but maybe, just maybe, this time – the spell is finally broken.

Hadley Freeman in the Times:

These questions about why so many teenage girls suddenly didn’t want to be female, to the point that they eventually outnumbered the boys at Gids by six to one, and why this didn’t give pause to anyone in charge at Gids (the clinicians there who dared to question it were silenced and even pushed out) are at the heart of the final report from the senior paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass on the NHS’s treatment of gender-confused young people, which was published last week. And yet some still don’t get it. A leader in The Guardian on Friday said the Cass review had made “a connection between the rise in girls experiencing a mental health crisis and the rise of girls developing gender-related distress. Such an assumption lays Dr Cass open to the charge that her suggestions are tantamount to talking people out of their desired gender change.”

That “people” is telling: for too long, too many have argued that enabling children to change their body is part of the wider drive for acceptance of trans adults. But the two things are very different. A teenage girl who suddenly fears becoming a woman has nothing to do with, say, a middle-aged male who decides to live as a woman. Yet activists have energetically pushed the line that all gender-confused people should be seen as analogous, just as they say trans people should be seen as akin to gay people, and therefore any questions about why a teenage girl might not want to be female are as verboten as asking a gay man why he doesn’t fancy women.

That Guardian comment is in effect the trans "conversion therapy" line: that troubled young girls, terrified of puberty and hot off the social media treadmill, should be believed when they say they were born in the wrong body and demand to change sex, and any opposition, or mutterings about "maybe we should talk about this", should be made illegal. It's terrifyingly bonkers, and of course grotesquely irresponsible in our duty of care to these youngsters.

Teenage girls have always expressed unhappiness through their body, and feared becoming women. Some starve themselves (generally starting at 12 to 16), shrinking their breasts and stopping their periods. Some cut themselves. And, increasingly, some insist they are a boy. Gids’s largest patient group? Girls aged — yup — 12 to 16. In my 2023 book about anorexia, Good Girls, one former Gids psychologist described gender dysphoria in teenage girls as “the new anorexia”.

As Cass says in her report, there is huge concern about teenage girls’ mental health, with rising rates of eating disorders and self-harm. Yet because gender activists have argued that gender is special and should be ringfenced from questions, apparently no one with any power in the NHS suggested that maybe the thousands of girls suddenly saying they were boys might be a mental health problem, rather than a progressive triumph….

No child and certainly no teenage girl should be told they were born in the wrong body, any more than they should be told that losing weight or having bigger breasts would make them happier. The only way to get girls through the physical discomfort of puberty is not to block it but to reassure them — repeatedly — that there isn’t one way to look, have sex and live as a woman, but many; and their body isn’t who they are, but it is what they are — female — and that will never change. Their feelings about it will, though, and one day they will see their body not as the enemy, but as a miracle.

Jack Delano, January 1943. Riverdale, Illinois. "Freight operations of the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad. Grain elevator and mill at a siding of the Harbor Belt's Blue Island Yard south of Chicago."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

Strong words from Kemi Badenoch in the Sunday Times today:

Reading much of the commentary on the Cass review, it is clear some think the battle over gender ideology is won. Sadly this is not the end of the matter, merely the beginning.

Much of what Dr Hilary Cass exposed in her report has been known for some time. I set out some of the evidence in a letter to the women and equalities select committee that many trans-identifying children turn out to be gay or autistic and do not always retain the identity into adulthood. Yet, again and again we have been confronted with institutional resistance.

Cass has made important recommendations but they are largely focused on managing NHS services better. None of this will happen until we address the underlying problem of ideological capture. It has become almost impossible to question fashionable theories if they are promoted under the banner of progressivism or social justice. Dissent is treated as evidence of bad faith, bigotry or a lack of intellectual sophistication.

The most obvious victims in this heartbreaking scandal were the detransitioners. Those young people were subjected to irreversible medical procedures while too vulnerable to give meaningful consent. Now they no longer believe themselves to be born in the wrong body but many have been left deformed or unable to have children.

There was another group: the brave clinicians and whistleblowers who put their careers on the line to alert politicians and the public to what was going on. Even now they are terrified that some of their colleagues will try and ruin their careers. One of the most serious revelations in Cass’s report was the refusal of many treatment providers to co-operate.

This is why I am cautious about celebrating victory too early. There is plenty of evidence that Stonewall and its allies are simply hoping for a change of government before continuing with their crusade. They misrepresent the law, pretending it says what it does not, and they will misrepresent the Cass report.

Over three decades, politicians of all parties have outsourced power to so-called independent institutions. They were meant to take the politics out of decision-making but have themselves become politicised often with little to no ministerial oversight. They are no longer impartial. As politicians ceded control, many institutions became captured by a minority of ideological activists. When ministers raise the alarm or intervene this is demonised by Labour MPs such as Yvette Cooper as engaging in “culture wars”….

In the case of trans ideology, those who first publicly questioned its tenets were subjected to hysterical abuse and calumny. Brave people including Kathleen Stock and Graham Linehan were hounded out of their jobs. James Esses lost his role at Childline. The Labour MP Rosie Duffield was harassed by her own party members and fellow MPs while Starmer looked away.

Worse than the ravings of the militants was the cowardice of those in positions of influence. How many university administrators, media editors, police officers and politicians preferred to keep quiet for fear of becoming the next target or in the hope of maintaining their progressive credentials?

We need more bravery and less cancel culture.

At the heart of the Cass review is a failure of institutions to self-regulate. Ministers have intervened time and again but it is now time for leaders to step up and recover impartiality. It is time that the clinicians who refused to co-operate with Cass were held to account.

It is good to hear Labour politicians admit culpability in failing to challenge extreme gender ideology. But I don’t believe this change of heart is real….

For those who ask how this happened under a Conservative government, they should look at the spread of extreme gender ideology across the western world from America and Canada through Europe to Australia and New Zealand. The reality is that Britain is leading the charge against it.

The tendency to censor, shout down and punish unfashionable opinions offends the principles of a free society. It also ruins lives by stopping people raising the alarm. Had those who warned that gender services in the NHS had been hijacked by ideologues been listened to instead of gagged, children would not have been harmed and the Cass review would not have been required. Our responsibility is to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.

Well yes. she's a politician – of course she's going to make political capital of this. But fair enough: she has been the one senior politician to speak out regularly on this.

Elsewhere in the Times:

Badenoch’s comments will be welcomed by right-wing Tory MPs but seen by critics as seeking to reignite the so-called culture wars that have dominated British politics since the last election.

Is this really just a question of right-wing vs. left-wing? Is Rosie Duffield right wing for speaking out on gender issues? And, like it or not, this particular gender war is going to be around for a while yet. The more we talk about it the better.

 

 

More from the excellent Café Royal Books catalogue – here with photographer Douglas Corrance:

[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Dougls Corrance]