Mick Hartley

Scotland is not, of course, a cesspit of hatred. Like most countries in Europe the incidents of racist or homophobic abuse have been on the decline for years. Abuse of women – well, that's another matter, but that's the one area the new Hate Crime Act was never interested in since sex – unlike gender – isn't even a protected characteristic. Clearly what this is all about is the SNP's revenge on the embarrassing self-ID farrago. It's aimed at gender-critical women. But JK Rowling's courageous intervention cleverly earthed that particular threat: go on then, she said, arrest me. They didn't, wisely enough, so now women in general, less wealthy and less well-known, feel freed to call out trans nonsense.

Janice Turner in the Times:

So what fuelled this zeal for a strange, autocratic regime of anonymous snitching? Within the Scottish state-funded LGBT sector there was a real desire to silence feminists who opposed and then thwarted the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Scottish women have grown used to police knocks over tweets or campaign stickers and to brazen, often violent attempts to shut them up.

Yet for the hapless Yousaf, fighting hate is also a useful political displacement activity. In the last 15 years, Scotland’s dismal governing class has proved itself unequal to serving its citizens. A once revered education system has plunged down the Pisa rankings; drug deaths, by far the worst in Europe, surged in 2023; it has the UK’s highest suicide rate; NHS Scotland, despite a 10 per cent boost in funds, is treating fewer patients than pre-pandemic; the 2021-22 police clear-up rate for sex crimes is the lowest since 1976. These are hard, intractable, material problems — how much easier to fight a mythical beast.

A society grows hateful when resources are scarce, resentments brew, desperate people lash out. So the SNP’s hate campaign addressed young, working-class men who suffer “economic deprivation, adverse childhood experiences, substance abuse and under-employment”. Did they offer employment advice, drug programmes or mental health counselling? No, the SNP’s deplorables got a red furry cartoon hate monster with a rich Glasgow accent telling them to tamp down their rage….

Rowling’s power move neutralised the law’s use against gender critical beliefs. But it also smashed a taboo: now ordinary Scots know they can call trans women blokes, ignore pronouns. Politesse is dead. Good for legal clarity, less so for trans people quietly trying to live their lives. And here the fault lies not with Rowling but in an ill-considered, incoherent law.

Even now the police won’t say what becomes of these growing thousands of complaints. They promised to investigate every single one but officer recruitment is low, police stations are closing, burglaries go uninvestigated, campaigners are aghast that aggravated incidents against society’s most vulnerable, the learning disabled, will be swamped by silly or mischievous reports.

Scotland is fast becoming Europe’s crazy policy test lab and this ludicrous law is surely busted along with Yousaf, who as justice minister pushed it through. But every Scottish party, bar the Tories, supported this act. A chorus of interest groups and quangos had convinced them hate was everywhere. So they abandoned the gruelling business of governing and chose to believe in witches instead.

This may be a disaster of the SNP's own making, but it's worth remembering that all the other parties save the Tories – Labour, the Greens, the Lib-Dems – voted for it.

And, in praise of Rowling, Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:

Rowling deliberately defied the new woolly hate crime laws with a series of tweets calling well-known trans women, men.

Humza Yousaf had been warned that this legislation was unworkable by numerous women’s groups. Men who identified as women were protected but women weren’t. How on earth were the police going to deal with this?

Who would blink first? Rowling or the police? When what she said was not deemed a hate crime, everything began to fall apart. “Oh, it’s OK for her with her wealth” some said and there she was again, asserting that if any other woman was arrested, she would repeat those words and be arrested alongside them.

Here was a lesson in solidarity, in sisterhood and the simple but incendiary power of saying no.

The cases are real, the people are real, the breasts are vinyl, this is Jugs Judy

— Clive Simpson (@QueensSpeechUK) April 5, 2024

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In Seattle. Story here.

MIT philosophy professor Alex Byrne on The Phantasmagoric World of Judith Butler. He's not at all impressed with her new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? Worth a read for the detail, but here's his conclusion:

In Butler’s phantasmagoric world, the oceans are boiling, bisexuals lie dying in the streets, and the empty shelves of school libraries gather dust. On a hillside, J. K. Rowling stands between Vladimir Putin and the Pope, the papal cassock flapping in the breeze. The trio gaze with grim satisfaction at the devastation below, under a glowering sky.

Plagiarism aside, there are many reasons to be irritated with Who’s Afraid of Gender?. One is Butler’s delusional insinuation that gender-critical feminists have engaged in “bullying” and “censorship campaigns”, when they and their sympathizers have so plainly been on the receiving end. (Butler signed the censorious 2017 open letter denouncing the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia for publishing Rebecca Tuvel’s paper on transracialism.)

Another is Butler’s claim that her opponents “refuse to read the material under dispute”. In serving up this dog’s breakfast of a book, Butler shows that she is the one who has not done the reading.

 

The determination by sections of the Western media and the Western elite to portray the killing of the aid workers in Gaza as deliberate, and part of Israel's "genocide" against the Palestinians, is, says Daniel Bel-Ami at Spiked, the new blood libel:

Israel’s unintentional killing of seven aid workers in an airstrike in Gaza on Monday was undoubtedly a calamity. However, the frenzied discussion of the tragedy suggests that, for many prominent commentators at least, there is more going on here than meets the eye. A new version of the blood libel has taken hold, and it is warping how the Israel-Hamas war is being discussed and understood….

There should be no doubt that the killing of the aid workers was accidental. To deliberately engage in such an operation would be totally irrational from the perspective of Israel’s self-interest. Plus, there is no evidence that this was anything other than a horrendous mistake. It looks likely there was a degree of negligence involved. But to draw firm conclusions we will need to wait for the results of the considered enquiries conducted by Israeli forces, independent organisations and the media.

But anti-Israel activists have shown no such patience. For them, the strike merely confirms their prejudice that Israel is a uniquely bloodthirsty state. This is the contemporary version of the medieval blood libel – the deranged notion that it is in Jews’ nature to want to kill non-Jews, and children in particular….

The reaction to the tragic killing of those aid workers has revealed just how much Israel is up against. Western elites appear convinced that it is in Israel’s nature to want to kill innocent civilians. The success of this anti-Semitic propaganda, this rebranded blood libel, shows that Israel’s position has become even more vulnerable. Not only does it face implacable hostility from the Islamist movement, but it also enjoys increasingly meagre support from the West.

Too few in the West seem to understand the threat that Islamism poses. It is a contemporary form of totalitarianism. Israel may be on the front line, but Islamism is a menace to democracy and freedom everywhere – not to mention the real force for genocide in the Middle East.

With any discussion of Israel and the Jews' fight for survival in the Middle East, a strange mist descends on otherwise seemingly rational people. I think there's a name for it…

Leor Sapir – The reckoning over puberty blockers has arrived:

Across the United States, thousands of parents have consented to having their children’s puberty stopped with a class of drugs called gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists. Known colloquially as “puberty blockers,” these drugs overstimulate the pituitary gland to the point of preventing it from sending signals to the ovaries or testes to start producing the hormones responsible for puberty.

Parents who have consented to these drugs for their children love their kids dearly, but they’ve consented under entirely false pretenses. The doctors who’ve advised them say that puberty blockers are known to improve mental health — that they are even life-saving — and that they are fully reversible and just give kids “time to think.” None of this is true. […]

Parents should never have been put in the position of having to decide whether to “allow” their kids to go through puberty. Those who would put the onus on parents are letting charlatans in the medical profession off the hook. Puberty is difficult for all teens, and it is not a disease. Puberty blockers offer teens in distress — especially girls with history of sexual abuse, autistic kids and gay kids — false hope by casting puberty as optional.

Puberty is a rite of passage from childhood into adulthood, responsible for the development of the body’s major organs and systems and not just its external sexual features. Puberty blockers rob children of their right to an open future.

Comprehensive, and devastating.

Brazil's President Lula appears to be in the grip of antisemitic mania. From the JC:

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva claimed on Wednesday that over 12 million children have died in Gaza and Israel due to the nearly six-month war.

Citing documents circulating online, the leftist leader said that "12.3 million children died in the Gaza Strip and in Israel because of the war," speaking at a government conference on the rights of children and adolescents in the capital Brasilia, Israel's Army Radio reported on Thursday.

The combined population of Israel and Gaza in 2023 was around 11 million. The figure cited by Lula is also about 375 times the number of deaths in Gaza put out by the Hamas-run health ministry during the war, which itself doesn't distinguish between combatants and noncombatants and whose accuracy has been questioned by experts.

He's already compared Gaza to the Holocaust. Of course.

Girls in Kabul attend a graduation course for memorising the Koran. From the Times (paper, not online).

[Photo: Samiullah Popal/EPA]

The Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, as we know, is run by trans woman Mridul Wadhwa, who was appointed to a woman's job despite having no gender recognition certificate. He made no secret of his aims, suggesting that women rape victims who objected to being dealt with by a man needed to reframe their trauma, and be "challenged on your prejudices". 

And now:

A rape crisis centre run by a trans woman has been “illegitimately” hiding the biological sex of its counsellors from victims of sexual assault, an employment tribunal has heard.

Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, whose chief executive is Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman and activist, was said to have used “disciplinary processes to enforce its extreme and uncompromising version of gender identity theory”.

The case of constructive dismissal centres on Roz Adams, a support worker at the charity, who is claiming she was wrongly accused of “transphobia” and endured a nine-month disciplinary process. Adams now works at Beira’s Place, a centre funded by JK Rowling, offering “sexual violence support service for women — run by women.”

When she joined the rape crisis centre, Adams, 52, had welcomed its trans-inclusive policies, believing everyone who has “suffered sexual assault is entitled to support”, according to Naomi Cunningham, her barrister.

The dispute began when she consulted colleagues about a rape victim who had asked if her counsellor would be a “man or a woman” because she would feel “uncomfortable talking to a man”. It intensified when a non-binary member of the centre’s staff copied Wadhwa into an email chain and an investigation was launched into Adams’s conduct.

The rape crisis centre’s procedures were unacceptable, argued Cunningham, who is also chairwoman of Sex Matters, an organisation campaigning for clarity about sex in language, policy and law. She said: “If [the centre] is trying to justify using disciplinary processes to enforce its extreme and uncompromising version of gender identity theory, the tribunal has to ask: what is the aim? Is the aim legitimate and are the means chosen proportionate?

“It is for the tribunal to decide on that objective basis whether the aim of keeping the sex of support workers working with victims of rape secret from those service users is legitimate. I say it is clearly not a legitimate aim. It is hard to imagine an aim that is more illegitimate.”

In his closing remarks to the tribunal David Hay KC, defending the rape crisis centre, said there was no evidence of service users being disappointed by its services.

Cunningham suggested he was mistaken. In her written evidence Adams cited the case of a 60-year-old woman who was abused as a child and only “just begun [to] talk about it”. The woman approached the crisis centre about group work and asked: “Can you reassure me it is just a woman-only group?”

The woman was repeatedly told that such meetings were “trans-inclusive”.

Cunningham said: “The tone of the conversation changed and a few days later she got an email saying: ‘You are not suitable for our services.’”…

The tribunal had previously been told that Wadhwa told an audience that the “best way” to get staff to support trans inclusion policies was to “fire them”. Nicole Jones, a former student, told the hearing that the word “transphobes” was used in a “disparaging way”, adding: “She was asked what’s the best way to get staff on board with inclusion policies and she responded bluntly, ‘Fire them.’”

A rape crisis centre, to serve desperate women who've been subjected to male violence, appears to have been turned into an affirmation centre for transitioned men. The women are victims twice over.

UK media – the BBC, the Times – are determined to paint Israel as uniquely malevolent, deliberately targeting aid workers. Friendly fire errors in war are tragically common, but when Israel is involved it can, of course, only be deliberate.

Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator:

David Cameron has got some front. The Foreign Secretary is haranguing Israel over its tragic unintentional killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, and yet he oversaw a war in which such ‘friendly fire’ horrors were commonplace. In fact, more than seven people were slain in accidental bombings under Cameron’s watch.

It was the Libya intervention of 2011. In that Nato-led excursion, in which Cameron, then prime minister, was an enthusiastic partner, numerous Libyans died as a result of misaimed bombs. Things got so bad that the West’s allies took to painting the roofs of their vehicles bright pink in an effort to avoid Nato’s missiles.

In one awful incident, 13 people were slaughtered by our ‘friendly fire’. Their number included not only anti-Gaddafi rebels but also ambulance workers. It was in the wake of this calamity that the rebels got out the pink paint. ‘How to avoid friendly fire? Libya rebels try pink’, said a headline at NBC News.

Yet now Cameron is on his high horse over Israel’s bombing of trucks carrying volunteers from the World Central Kitchen. He is demanding a ‘full, transparent explanation of what happened’. Fine. Three of the dead were British nationals, so it makes perfect sense Britain wants answers. But you would think a former PM who was involved in wars in which other accidents happened would understand that ‘friendly fire’, sadly, is all but inevitable in bloody conflict.

This is not to downplay the horror of what happened in Gaza on Monday. That civilians were killed while trying to help people, while trying to deliver food, is horrendous. It is fitting that the Israeli president Isaac Herzog has apologised for the bombings, and that the Israeli government has promised to get to the bottom of what happened.

And yet there is something off, even something nauseating, in all the Western finger-wagging. It isn’t only Cameron. US president Joe Biden has also weighed in, saying he is ‘outraged’ by the killing of the aid workers. You can’t help but wonder whether he directed similar outrage at his own nation’s military when 37 Afghanis at a wedding party, mostly women and children, were killed by mistake in a US airstrike….

Vast numbers of civilians have been killed by accident by the US in recent years. At another wedding party in 2004, this time in Iraq, 11 women and 14 children were killed by American fire. Was there a ‘full, transparent explanation’ for that calamity?

Terrible accidents happen in war. That’s because war is hell. If you hate the war in Gaza, as you should, then you should aim your ire at Hamas, the virulently anti-Semitic terror group that started this war with its pogrom against the people of southern Israel on 7 October. The seven decent souls of World Central Kitchen would be alive today had Hamas not taken the decision to visit its racist barbarism on the Jewish State.

For once war starts, error becomes unavoidable. There are few wars in history – none, perhaps – in which innocents have not perished in the violent maelstrom. What is striking about Israel’s mistake is that it is not being treated as ‘friendly fire’ at all. Instead it is held up as proof of Israel’s evil, evidence of its malevolence.

Across social media, the cry goes up: Israel did this on purpose. It seems Israel is the only state not allowed to make mistakes. Where us decent Westerners kill friends in error, Israel does it intentionally, with malice at its heart. The double standards are staggering. It is hypocritical and ridiculous for the citizens of nations that have accidentally killed far more people than Israel to now lecture Israel about its wayward bombs.

It's a similar story with the al-Shifa hospital. Media coverage here has largely portrayed the IDF campaign as a deliberate and malevolent attack on an innocent hospital – what could be worse? – without bothering to explain that the place was, by common knowledge, a Hamas stronghold in keeping with their strategy of using hospitals and schools as their operational centres. The JC:

The IDF has killed more Hamas militants in the recent operation in Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital than in any other single operation since the war began, according to the IDF’s chief spokesperson Daniel Hagari.

The operation – which began on 18 March and ended on April 1 – reportedly killed some 200 terrorists from Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad faction and took more than 900 captive including senior commanders. Israeli troops also seized weapons and millions in US and Jordanian currencies from inside the hospital, according to the IDF.

Thousands of Palestinians who had sought refuge in al-Shifa hospital were forced to evacuate through a checkpoint to shelters south of the hospital, while Israeli special forces conducted room-to-room searches. CCTV footage and video from inside showed firefights erupting as terrorists had barricaded themselves in the maternity ward and emergency rooms. Other Hamas members, according to the IDF, fired mortars at the hospital and Israeli troops from outside.

You're unlikely to get that kind of information from the BBC.

John Collier, November 1942. "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (vicinity). Champion No. 1 cleaning plant. Loaded coal cars ready for market."

[Photo: Shorpy/John Collier, Office of War Information]