Mick Hartley

From Newsweek – Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib on The Origin of Hamas's Human Shields Strategy in Gaza:

In November 2006, months after Hamas won parliamentary elections and after the group began entrenching its rule in Gaza, Nizar Rayan, a political leaders and liaison with Hamas' armed wing, introduced a novel strategy to protect the houses of Hamas militants from IDF bombardment. Rayan, a fiery religious clerk within Hamas and a rising militant star, marshaled hundreds of civilians into a house that had received IDF warnings of an impending strike. Instead of fleeing, Rayan called on people to swarm the house and cover its rooftop with as many civilians as possible to force the Israeli military into a choice: Either commit a massacre, or call off the airstrike.

Israel called off the strike, and the incident received widespread international attention. Though the tactic drew condemnation from Human Rights Watch, which criticized calling civilians to the scene of a planned attack as risky and dangerous, Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh praised the tactic as a marvelous feat of perseverance and nonviolent resistance.

Nizar Rayan proclaimed victory and vowed to use the self-described "human shields on rooftops" strategy to prevent future destruction of Hamas members' houses and infrastructure. It would go on to be used dozens of times in the years leading up to the first major war between Israel and Hamas in 2008-2009….

Multiple things are true simultaneously: The Israeli military kills civilians in its pursuit of militants and subsequently attempts to absolve itself of moral and operational responsibility by blaming Hamas's use of Gazans as human shields. And Hamas absolutely disregards the safety and well-being of Gazans by deliberately and nefariously placing its infrastructure and armaments among civilians and crowded neighborhoods and cities throughout the Gaza Strip. The group gives itself the right to be anywhere it deems necessary in Gaza because the interests of the "resistance" far outweigh any harm done to innocent civilians in pursuit of the supposed "greater good" and the "liberation of Palestine."

The Scarlet Blake affair rumbles on, as JK Rowling enters the fray – "I'm so sick of this shit. This is not a woman."

Lauren Smith at Spiked:

The gruesome case of Scarlet Blake really should have been the last straw. We have become all too numb to the way the police, the courts and the media have adopted the preferred pronouns of dangerous and predatory men. How male perverts, paedophiles and rapists are now routinely treated as women, based on their self-declared identities. You might have hoped that the sheer depravity of Blake’s crimes, and the depths of his mental delusions, would jolt our elites into sanity. But you’d be wrong. In the wall-to-wall coverage of Blake’s crimes, he is consistently referred to as a ‘woman’….

This week, Blake was sentenced to life in prison. Thankfully, he will be housed in a high-security men’s prison and not in a female estate, as so often happens with trans-identifying criminals.

But while the prison system is thankfully not treating Blake as a woman, the media have overwhelmingly bowed down to his delusions about his gender. Headlines from the Mirror, Sky News and the Independent all talked about the ‘“Cat killer” woman’. In some reports of Blake’s crimes, like ITV’s, you’ll have to get several paragraphs in before there is any mention that this ‘woman’ is trans. Most reports – including on BBC News – do not mention this at all. He is presented simply as a ‘woman’, without qualification.

Everyone seems to be in agreement that Blake is mentally disturbed and delusional. No one has felt compelled to describe him as a ‘cat’, despite the fact he sometimes identifies as one. No one has felt the need to acknowledge the other personas that he claims he shares his head with. And yet, almost the entire mainstream media have happily repeated his equally false claim that he is a woman and not a man.

Herein lies the madness of the trans ideology. It asks us to ignore biological reality. And instead, it expects us to pander to the fantasies of even the most dangerous and mentally unstable criminals. The grim case of the cat killer surely has to be the limit.

The Times report today – comments of course turned off:

The daughter of an Oxford fellow has been sentenced to life in prison for fulfilling a warped sexual fantasy by mutilating a cat and killing a stranger.

There's something particularly vile about this level of language abuse. Daughter?? 

Also in the Times today, Hugo Rifkind witters on about the danger of AI and deepfake, and how the media must be the answer:

Media, meanwhile, needs to be the antidote to fakery rather than its vector. I say this wincingly, as somebody who has occasionally been duped himself, but there really should be no greater shame for a journalist than spreading a fraud.

Yet the Times, and every other major news outlet, is happy to continue spreading the fraud that one of the most horrific recent cases of murder in the UK was committed by a woman.

Leeds University: students told to debate:

Was Oct 7th Justified?

Leeds, where a lecturer published directions to the Hillel, where the Jewish Chaplin who'd been in the IDF was threatened and driven out and where a student had her essay failed because it was critical of Hamas. pic.twitter.com/CIeSUmQWjO

— David Hirsh (@DavidHirsh) February 26, 2024

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Juliet Samuel in the Times this morning:

Well, what did we expect? This began with an impromptu carnival of fireworks and music outside the Israeli embassy on the day in October when 1,200 Jews were massacred by terrorists. It continued with mass chants of “O Jews, the army of Muhammad is coming!”, the wearing of Hamas masks and bandanas, imams filmed in mosques from Redbridge to Bradford denouncing “the filth of the Jews” and the “curse of the Jews”, and the closure of central London every Saturday for the same protest. Synagogues moved service times and many Jews started hiding visible signs of their religion.

Now it is escalating, with credible threats of violence against MPs who do not toe the line, a blockade of Tower Bridge, a January 6-style call for a mob to force “[them] to lock the doors of parliament itself” and the projection of a slogan with genocidal heritage onto the icon of London, the Elizabeth Tower. It goes to show the truth of a very basic principle, from parenting to policing: if you do not establish and enforce acceptable standards of behaviour, even on passionate protests, that behaviour will deteriorate.

So why is it that the police stand passively watching a pro-Palestinian mob halt traffic and yet will, in other cases, rip down posters of Hamas’s kidnap victims or order the removal of a mobile billboard displaying the victims’ faces for the sake of “community relations”?

The answer, quite clearly, is fear. The forces of law and order fear those who break the law on the pro-Palestinian side, but they do not fear anyone on the pro-Israel side.

Last week, we reached a new low. Our constitution was altered under threat of violence. It may have been an apparently minor procedural point, but it was a watershed. Perhaps Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, considered various factors in his decision to upend years of convention last week. But we know that at least one big motive was his fear, based on credible briefings, that several sitting MPs might be attacked or murdered if he allowed a contentious vote on Gaza to proceed. Three backbench MPs have been given police protection. A judge with pro-Palestinian sympathies gave three culprits newly convicted of terrorist offences notably lenient sentences.

And the sitting — non-Jewish — MP for Finchley & Golders Green, a constituency with a large Jewish population, is standing down under threat of attack from Islamists. In short, it is increasingly clear that the new law of the land is fear — fear of Islamist mobs whose aggression and violence have been rewarded with astounding accommodation.

None of this means that Lee Anderson was justified in saying that the mayor of London was “controlled” by Islamists, a claim made doubly absurd by Sadiq Khan’s amoral opportunism and stylistic resemblance to David Brent. It is quite right that Anderson was suspended. Neither does it mean that peaceful protest should be suppressed.

But it is absurd to claim, as some still do, that the biggest threat at present is the far right. What ought to excite more scrutiny and agitation is the steady deterioration of British state authority under threat of violent intimidation. Clearly, the government needs to examine the guidance and norms determining how the authorities respond to extremism and intimidation. The police and political leaders need to rediscover their appetite for confrontation with unacceptable elements of the pro-Palestinian movement, even where it involves risk and the use of force. Our education system needs the resources and political backing to tackle Holocaust denial and classroom extremism.

But what should worry us most is the possibility that our civil society has already frayed too far to be repaired, and that this is only going to get worse and worse. We cannot ultimately police our way out of a breakdown in civic norms brought about in large part by reckless immigration policy. If MPs are no longer safe because of how they vote in our parliament, that tells us something more profound than that our police are weak. It tells us that our society is weak. And that is a problem that none of our leaders has yet been willing to talk about.

Meanwhile:

Ministers must do more to prevent the Israel-Gaza protests from “draining” official resources as policing protests cost Scotland Yard almost £25 million, a report has found.

The figure covers the policing of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protests from the date the conflict ignited on October 7 to December 17 last year.

A cross-party group of MPs who make up the home affairs committee said it was “deeply dispiriting” to see the fight against hate crime get “stuck in Home Office limbo”.

Weekly demonstrations, which have drawn hundreds of thousands of people to central London, have strained the Met Police’s capabilities and impacted officers’ wellbeing, with more than 4,000 forced to abandon rest days over three months to ensure demonstrations passed off safely….

The Campaign Against Antisemitism said the report “fails to address the increasingly urgent need to restore the confidence of the British public and ensure the safety of this country’s Jewish community”.

A spokesperson added: “After months of intimidatory marches, this report offers no concrete recommendations for the here and now, just a long-term policy discussion about workforce planning and new laws that will take years to agree. Millions of pounds are being diverted from fighting crime into policing these relentless marches. The Jewish community is in fear and our city centres remain no-go zones during the protests. We need action urgently.”

John Vachon, February 1942. "Lancaster, Pennsylvania".

[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]

1. Islam is a religion founded in 610 by the Prophet Muhammad.
2. Islamism is an ideological and political movement which arose upon the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 ("Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in…

— Alan Johnson (@Fathom_Editor) February 26, 2024

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Full text:

1. Islam is a religion founded in 610 by the Prophet Muhammad.
2. Islamism is an ideological and political movement which arose upon the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 ("Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."), and among urban professionals in India in 1920 and 1930s, before spreading globally. Key ideologists include Hassan al-Banna, Mawlana Sayyid Abul A’la Mawdudi, Al-Nabhani, and Sayyid Qutb.
3. It is a hugely diverse movement which encompasses reformists, radicals and Jihadists and can take ‘right’ (Taliban) and ‘left’ forms (Shariati in Iran absorbed the anti-imperialist ideas of the European far left just as the Brotherhood / Salafist Reformism had earlier drawn on the ideas, slogans, and models of organisation of the inter-war left-totalitarian tradition).
4. All wings are anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-democratic, antisemitic and – implicitly or explicitly – totalitarian.
5. The claim that the two – Islam and Islamism, the religion and the ideology / movement – are identical is untrue.
6. The claim that there is just no relationship whatsoever between Islam and Islamism is – just as a brute empirical fact – also untrue.
7. To understand the complex, historically evolving relationship between Islam and Islamism you have to be willing to read, think, and discuss: you have to *know stuff*.
8. To treat any criticism of the ideology and movement of Islamism as a ‘phobia’ towards the religion of Islam would be wrong and a disaster for Western liberal democracies, leaving us defenceless.
9. To treat any criticism of the canonical texts of the religion, the Koran and Hadith, as an expression of hatred towards all Muslims would be wrong and would abandon those on the receiving end of some of those canonical texts: women, gays, Jews, and Muslim reformers, for a start.

At yesterday's "No to Terror" rally in Tavistock Square, from the JC:

The public response to October 7 showed that there are “different rules for Jews” who are killed in terrorist attacks, a survivor of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing has said. 

Speaking at the No To Terror rally in London on Sunday, Ziv Mann-Wineberg told the crowd that after the Manchester terrorist attack, which killed 22 and injured over 1,000, he had “watched the entire country, and the world, offer their support and condolences, united against terror”.

But on October 7, when terrorists “fuelled by the same extremist beliefs”, killed 1,200 people in southern Israel, wounded nearly 5,000 and took around 250 hostages into Gaza, the world responded with “victim blaming, celebration [and] outright denial”.

Mann-Wineberg, from Manchester, added: “So what's the difference? The victims were Jewish. And there seems to be different rules for Jews. It seems to be acceptable to celebrate terror when it is the Jewish people being terrorised.”…

The rally, which was held on Tavistock Square, the site of the 7/7 bus bombing, also heard from British-Palestinian pro-peace activist John Aziz.

Aziz said that his views on the Middle East had led to him being called a “traitor”, receiving death threats and being publicly disowned by a family member….

Aziz’s calls for peace were echoed by campaigner Loay Alshareef from Abu Dhabi. After being welcomed to the stage in Arabic by rally organisers, the 7/10 Human Chain Project, he said: “I want to say to Hamas sympathisers that I am really sorry to disappoint you. If you thought that the enmity between Jews and Arabs was eternal, it is not.”

Calling the fighting in Gaza “an ugly war that Israel didn’t ask for”, he said the war could end “in a second if all the hostages were released and Hamas lays down its weapons”.

Alshareef said that the only disappointment during a “great 10 days” in the UK, had been “the genocidal chant on the Houses of Parliament”, projected by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Joseph Cohen, executive director of the Israel Advocacy Movement, the largest pro-Israel online movement in the UK, said that October 7 had been a direct response to the normalising of relations between Israel and the Arab nations of the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.

“This terrified the terrorists. Because a world where Jews and Arabs co-exist is a world where Hamas have no purpose. Coexistence is a death blow to their genocidal cult.”

Marjory Collins, January 1943. "New York, New York. Italian-Americans on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Italian grocery store owned by the Ronga brothers on Mulberry Street."

[Photo: Shorpy/Marjory Collins for the Office of War Information]

I thought the battle against the ridiculous term "Islamophobia" had been pretty much lost. Encouraging to see this, then…

We use the term “Anti-Muslim hatred”. It makes clear the law protects Muslims. In this country, we have a proud tradition of religious freedom AND the freedom to criticise religion.

The definition of “Islamophobia” she uses creates a blasphemy law via the back door if adopted. https://t.co/lhHdSbs6Kz

— Kemi Badenoch (@KemiBadenoch) February 25, 2024

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MP Anna Firth in the Telegraph:

In 2021, Sir David Amess was stabbed to death by an Islamist extremist who targeted him because of the way he’d voted in the Commons on the war in Syria. I was elected as Sir David’s successor two years ago this month, and not a day goes by when I don’t think of how he was brutally murdered simply for doing his job.

Mike Freer, MP for Finchley and Golders Green, recently announced that he was stepping down, fed up and frightened due to Islamist extremists regularly targeting him and his loved ones. His office was firebombed. Chillingly, Mike narrowly missed falling victim to Sir David’s killer, who went looking for him first.

A lot of lovely sentiments have been expressed about both of these events, but has enough actually been done to tackle the fact that many, many Islamist fundamentalists with bad intentions live and walk among us? No, it hasn’t.

We seem afraid. Afraid to be seen as racist, or Islamophobic, even when we simply seek to save lives by speaking the truth. On Wednesday, in the House of Commons, the scale of this problem became crystal clear. If people at home felt bemused and upset by what happened, then they weren’t alone. I, too, could not believe what I was seeing.

I was made aware that the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, had met the Speaker to “urge” him to allow a vote on the Labour amendment to the SNP motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Starmer apparently did this so that Labour MPs could “safely” vote in a way that wouldn’t “upset” their constituents and would allegedly “spare” them and their families from being threatened and intimidated.

How Starmer went about “urging” the Speaker is unknown. But the circumstances were extraordinary enough to prompt a letter from the Clerk of the House, Tom Goldsmith, to the Speaker pointing out that “long-established conventions are not being followed in this case”.

At best this was a subversion of democracy that undermined the integrity of Parliament. At worst it was naked appeasement and a deliberate act of bowing to the mob who were protesting loudly outside and projecting anti-Semitic slogans onto Big Ben. I would like to see a law passed immediately to ban any unauthorised projections onto the buildings of Parliament.

But how has this mob, which includes Islamists and far-Left activists, become so powerful that its actions made MPs afraid to vote with their consciences? Why was the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, so willing to compromise himself and his reputation like this?

The events of Wednesday have certainly changed how I feel about doing my job as an MP. My office overlooks Whitehall and, on Wednesday, I could hear and see the protesters as they marched and grew in number and volume. I’d spoken in the SNP’s ceasefire debate and had stated my opinion that we cannot possibly vote for a ceasefire and leave the remaining Israeli hostages in the hands of Hamas. Seeing the baying mob outside made me feel wary of leaving the safety of my office.

I’d also come up against such attempted intimidation in my constituency. Shortly after the Hamas attacks of October 7, I went to my local synagogue to express my sympathies to the Southend Jewish community and to ask if I could do anything to help. I was welcomed warmly and my offer of help was appreciated.

I also have a mosque in my constituency, so a few weeks later I reached out to see if I could do anything to support them, especially in terms of organising humanitarian help for the innocent people of Gaza. I was invited inside and offered a seat before being surrounded by a number of men and one woman. She immediately started shouting, jabbing her finger in my face and demanding to know “how many babies had to die to satisfy my blood lust”. My aide, who was with me, suggested that we leave.

A few days later, there was an anti-war in the Middle East march in Southend with dolls covered in fake blood scattered on the pavement, under people holding placards saying “Anna Firth kills babies”. I was horrified. A police officer stood by and watched but did nothing. When I saw Met Commander Sir Mark Rowley a week later in the Commons, he agreed that this was intimidation and explained that the police do have powers to intervene and stop people inciting violence like this. So why didn’t they?

If this is happening in a fairly centre-Right southern city like Southend, I can only imagine what some of my other Parliamentary colleagues must be going through. Even though I disagree with what Starmer and Sir Lindsay did, I understand the Speaker’s wish to try to protect MPs from threats and violence and I have accepted Sir Lindsay’s apology. But protecting MPs is a job for the police.

I was always taught to stand up to bullies, not to give in, and never, ever to let myself be intimidated. It’s hard, though, when the threat is real and nobody wants to admit where it’s coming from. If you can’t name it, you can’t protect yourself from it.