Mick Hartley

Patrick O'Flynn in the Spectator – What the Rochdale disaster says about Keir Starmer:

Starmer’s flip-flopping and lack of principle is already, as financial market analysts say, ‘priced in’. Voters have noticed his U-turns on everything from trans rights to green investment and do not expect him to do the right thing at first contact with any problem. In normal times that might indeed be a disabling fault in someone aspiring to be prime minister, as indeed it proved for the former unilateral disarmer Neil Kinnock back in the day. But these are not normal times because the Conservative party brand is holed below the waterline.

What Starmer’s appalling handling of an obviously open-and-shut case of indefensible bigotry does offer though is a troubling glimpse into the likely course of his looming premiership.

He stood by Ali for the best part of three days despite the candidate’s peddling of the disgusting and false conspiracy theory that Israel deliberately facilitated the October 7 pogrom against its own citizens. He even sent a series of senior frontbenchers out to bat for Ali, including Pat McFadden, Lisa Nandy and Nick Thomas-Symonds.

And only when they had made themselves look soft on anti-Semitism did he pull the rug from Ali, after the Daily Mail had disclosed further remarks in a similar vein: that Jews in the media were whipping things up and Israel had been planning a land-grab in Gaza, that sort of thing.

This is the kind of conduct that contributed heavily to Boris Johnson being defenestrated at the behest of dozens of ministers who had become heartily sick of getting sent out on to the airwaves to trash their own reputations by peddling unsustainable positions.

Not that Starmer will care. It's amost certain he'll be the next PM. And whatever happens in Rochdale – a George Galloway win, perhaps, or Ali as an independent candidate – it won't matter in the larger scheme of things. It is though, as the saying goes, symptomatic of a deeper malaise.

But on Friday morning Starmer is still going to be smelling of roses as he basks in two more by-election wins in the Tory-held and once ‘safe’ seats of Kingswood and Wellingborough. Rochdale can then be written off as a little local difficulty. The flaws in his political technique are going to count heavily against him. But not yet.

Historian Dr. Osman Latiff – formerly of Royal Holloway College, now an English and history teacher at the Al-Madani school in Slough – does the full Holocast Inversion:

Dr. Salman Butt: "What can we learn, in terms of remembrance from the Holocaust? What are some of the parallels and so forth when it comes to what's happening in Gaza? […]

"Lots of apologists for Israeli crimes online, on Twitter, for example, they hit back at comparisons to Nazis and so forth, saying, among other things: 'We are being attacked, we are just defending ourselves, we're the ones who are the victim. Palestinians did a terrorist attack, or they are throwing rockets, so we're defending ourselves. So, we have to do this.'

"Is there a parallel in the Nazi Holocaust of this type of discourse?"

Dr. Osman Latiff: "Yes, there is absolute parallel because the Nazis said the same things. The Nazis said: 'We are being attacked'. The Nazis, in fact, inflated numbers, they criticized any scrutiny of their actions by the Allied powers. The Nazis had very similar thing. […]

"The Nazis saw themselves, Germans, as victims, as under oppression, because of the strength of European powers, and whenever they lashed out, they said: 'We are simply defending ourselves.' The Jews say the same thing today, but they also have the same thing as the Nazis… The fact that they… When it comes to, for example, numbers they exaggerate, inflate the numbers. […]

"There are many, like you mentioned. I remember when we went to Auschwitz, we drove from Krakov, the cultural hub of Poland, to Auschwitz, but we passed by a town or a village, called Oświęcim. We were told that Oświęcim was this industrial city during the Holocaust and it provided a bit of a cover for the world, because they couldn't believe… How could you have the horrors of the Holocaust happening right next to industrial center called Oświęcim. I think that sense of cover is very typical and is very repeated today.

"[It is ] the same when people see, for example, progress of Tel Aviv. They talk about Tel Aviv and industry, progress, scientific wonders, and big buildings, and whatever. And then, of course, just around the corner you have a genocide committed against Gaza.

"I think that sense of fake veneer of civility should never be a distraction for us because that can be, and it should never [be]. And I think that’s something we should be wary of because sometimes within the cloak of civility that people can commit the worst of all deeds.

 

The old Judenrein chant gets a Harvard makeover. https://t.co/hXf27RGV2w

— Alan Johnson (@Fathom_Editor) February 12, 2024

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Male high jumper Maelle Jacques won a GIRLS' high school state title yesterday in New Hampshire. @NHIAA_LOA

His winning jump was almost 10" lower than the boys' winning height. His 10 pt score helped the Kearsage HS girls' track & field team jump to runner-up in the state among… pic.twitter.com/mX2c0lUOHS

— ICONS (@icons_women) February 12, 2024

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An instructive tale from the Daily NK on the dangers of taking too literally the latest instructions from on high:

At the Second National Meeting of Elementary Propaganda Workers in 2019, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent a letter to participants entitled “Let’s Use Novel Propaganda and Agitation to Increase the Momentum of the Revolution,” which read in part:

“Greatness education [about the Kim family] is not about how the leader exists apart from the people, but how he lives and dies, suffers and rejoices with the people. It should deepen the students’ understanding of him as a leader of the people who’s devoted to the happiness of the people. If the greatness education emphasizes the greatness of the leader by mystifying his revolutionary activities and personality, it may obscure the facts. Total loyalty comes when the people are captivated by the leader on a personal and comradely [political] level.”

In short, the letter instructed them to avoid mystifying or deifying the leader in ideological education. Kim urged the propaganda officials to inspire loyalty through humanistic propaganda and agitation about the leader instead of the “groundless and absurd” exaltations common in the propaganda of the Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il eras.

In response, the Ministry of Education prepared a new nationwide curriculum with a new emphasis on making the leader appear human in “greatness education.” The ministry ordered schools to teach revolutionary history according to the new curriculum from the second semester. The ministry also instructed the provincial, city, and county education departments to inspect the first schools to teach revolutionary history using the new, more realistic curriculum, which was to begin on the first day of the second semester with this new humanistic approach.

These orders explain the strange scene that took place in a certain classroom at Sinpo High School in Sinpo, North Hamgyong Province, at the beginning of the second semester. As instructed, on September 2, 2019, eleven observers entered a single classroom to audit the lesson as a class of third-year students received their first lesson of the semester on the “revolutionary history of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung.”

Kim Wonchol, the then 51-year-old director of revolutionary history education at Sinpo High School, stood at the podium and gave a lecture on how Kim Il Sung had set up a secret base camp on Mt. Baekdu as the headquarters of the revolution while crossing the border between North Korea and China to bring the struggle against the Japanese imperialists to Korea.

In the middle of his lecture, a student raised his hand with a question. “In the second year, we went on an expedition to explore the long road to independence. The weather in Yanggang Province was so cold, unlike here [in Sinpo] near the sea. My textbook says that the weather at the secret base camp was bitterly cold, often hovering around minus 40 degrees [C]. How could people survive in such conditions?”

The teacher replied: “As you said, the weather on Mt. Baekdu is extremely harsh. Both the leader and each member of his anti-Japanese guerrilla unit were human beings, so how could they endure and survive in such harsh conditions? Smoke could give away their position to the enemy, so the rules of the secret camp prevented the fighters from even lighting a fire properly. It would have been impossible to survive the bitter cold without breaking the rules.”

The teacher concluded: “If we want to make a concrete improvement in the revolutionary ideological education of the new generation, we must revise the curriculum to base our education on historical facts.”

At that moment some of the observers sitting in the back of the room began whispering among themselves and writing furiously in their notebooks.

That same evening, Kim was summoned to appear before the city’s party committee without explanation and never returned. Two days later, a Ministry of State Security truck arrived at the house in the middle of the night and took Kim’s wife and two daughters to an unknown location.

Later that year (2022), the Ministry of State Security agents involved in the case and their families leaked that Kim had been sent to a political prison camp for the crime of falsely teaching the new generation about the leader’s revolutionary activities.

During the Ministry of State Security’s investigation, Kim defended himself by saying, “All I did was follow what the marshal told the party, which was to educate the new generation in such a way that they could empathize with the leader [Kim Il Sung] on a human level. A student asked me how a person could survive in the minus 40-degree cold; should I say that he survived by his ‘wits’?”

As a result of his defense, the teacher was branded a “first-class reactionary”.

This incident was included in a bulletin distributed to educational personnel throughout the country at the end of 2022. Since then, education about the Kim family has more or less returned to what it was before Kim Jong Un’s letter. Two years later, at the time of this writing, North Korean schools continue to brainwash students about the greatness of the Kim leaders and idolize and deify the Kim family.

It's almost like they laid a trap: put it out that we're easing up on the hero worship of the god-like Kim cult, and see what idiots take the bait.

From the Jewish News:

A London theatre has said they are “sorry and saddened” over claims that a comedian who performed at their venue has been accused of directing an abusive rant at a Jewish member of the audience as they refused to join a standing ovation after he waved a Palestinian flag.

Paul Currie, who describes himself as an “experimental fusionist” and an “absurdist laughter chef” was coming to the end of his Shtoom show at the Soho Theatre in central London last Saturday, when he produced a Palestinian and a Ukrainian one from a prop box.

He then actively encouraged the audience at the Dean Street venue to give him a standing ovation.

Spotting one male still in his seat, according to onlookers the comic approached him and asked him;”‘Didn’t you enjoy my show?”

The man, who was later claimed to have been Israeli,allegedly replied: “I enjoyed your show until you brought out the Palestinian flag.”

What had begun as a humorous exchange quickly turned nasty, according to onlookers.

Onlookers claimed Currie shouted “Leave my fucking show, Now!” “Get out now”’The man and his partner both got up to leave, and were joined by at least four others who had witnessed the exchange and were left deeply uncomfortable.

But sources told Jewish News the situation went “from bad to worse” as chants of “Free Free Palestine” begun to be heard from some in the theatre. 

In a statement, Soho Theatre confirmed they were “thoroughly” investigating the allegations.

The text of the original social media message:

On Saturday night, 10th February 2024, my wife and I, along with two friends went to see a show called Shtoom by comedian Paul Currie, at the Soho Theatre, Dean Street, London W1D 3NE. We are all in our mid sixties. There were approximately 200 people in attendance for the one-hour show.

About 5-10 minutes from the end, Paul Currie retrieved two props from his box, one a Ukranian flag, the other a Palestinian one. Naturally we started to feel uneasy, but nothing prepared us for what followed.

Minutes later, the Comedian had encouraged the audience to stand at the end of the show, a kind of standing ovation, and when we all sat down again, he looked towards a young man sat in the second row and said "you didn't stand, why? Didn't you enjoy my show?".

The young man, who soon after we discovered was Israeli, replied "I enjoyed your show until you brought out the Palestinian flag". Paul Currie retorted "get out of my show!", which instantaneously escalated in to screaming at this young man, repeatedly shouting "Leave my fucking show, Now!" "Get out now" "I'm from Northern Island [sic], we know all about cease fire, get the fuck out of my show".

The young man and his partner rose to leave, and the four of us immediately rose to exit as well, as we both did not want to be part of an antisemitic rant, as well as feeling unsafe. By the time we exited, what felt like the entire audience were up on their feet shouting "free Palestine" "get out"!

Shaken and feeling threatened by the growing antagonism, we exited and tried to complain/ get some support from the front-of-house team at the theatre, who were not very sympathetic but did give us an email address to make a complaint.

By this time, the show had ended and the audience started exiting, a number of whom were glaring at us aggressively and in a very threatening way. We all left the scene.

Our friends later received a message from someone they knew who had also been at the show, saying that after we left, the situation became even more inflamed.

What had been intended to be an evening of comedy turned out to be what felt like an antisemitic rally.

We will be contacting Soho theatre to complain about Paul Currie, and are wondering if you have any suggestions of where else to report this.

The UK Comedy Guild perhaps, although we do not know whether Mr Currie is a member of this organisation”

Jews are now being targeted frequently by public figures in the UK and getting a room of people to vilify British Jews is even worse, in my opinion.

This cannot be allowed happen in this country in 2024.

The comedian's bad enough, but the reaction of the audience is what's really chilling: London's trendy comedy audience just a heartbeat away from an antisemitic hate mob.

Irony postscript: the Soho Theatre used to be a synagogue.

Brendan O'Neill on the Labour Rochdale scandal:

So Labour still has cranks in its ranks. The party remains a haven for conspiracy theorists. For all Keir Starmer’s claims to have rooted out the ‘anti-Zionist’ hotheads that swarmed the party in the Corbyn years, there still seem to be a fair few around.

Consider the Azhar Ali affair. Mr Ali is the Labour candidate in the upcoming Rochdale by-election. This is a man who has promoted the poisonous, post-truth claim that Israel ‘deliberately’ allowed the Hamas pogrom of 7 October to go ahead. Who has said Israel permitted the slaughter of more than a thousand of its own citizens so that it would have a ‘green light’ to invade Gaza.

Ali made these vile utterances at a meeting of the Lancashire Labour party shortly after the 7 October attacks. The Egyptians warned the Israelis that something big was about to happen, he said. The Americans warned them too. And yet still Israel ‘deliberately took the security off’. ‘They allowed… that massacre’, said Ali, because they believed it would give them ‘the green light to do whatever they bloody want.’

Think about what is being said here. That Israel is such a malign entity, such a twisted, devious state, that it was willing to sacrifice hundreds of its own citizens in order to gain a pretext for invading Gaza. This strange nation is so consumed by bloodlust, it seems, that it is content to allow the massacre of its own men, women and children in order to gain a sneaky excuse for ‘massacring’ Gaza.

This is a conspiracy theory, pure and simple. And it has eerie echoes of conspiracy theories of old, which likewise defamed Jews as uniquely cunning and bloodily self-serving. As the Campaign Against Antisemitism says, the idea that Israel essentially ‘engineered the murder of over 1,200 of its own people’ smacks of ‘a blood libel’.

Keir Starmer is happy for Ali to remain as Labour candidate. It was perhaps a choice between the principled decision to continue the resolve to remove any taint of antisemitism from the party, and the cynical decision to keep the Muslim vote onside – with the figleaf of Ali's somewhat stilted apology. Naturally it was the propect of the Muslim vote that won out and the Jews, again, get thrown under the bus.

I predict the Rochdale by-election will tell us a lot about 21st-century Britain, and none of it good. We will see, in real time, the deepening of that unholiest of marriages between sections of the Muslim community and the radical left, all united in their visceral loathing for Israel that sometimes crosses the line into something much, much darker. The socialism of fools remains unvanquished.

Update: well well – "The BBC understands Mr Ali has been suspended from Labour pending an investigation". So the protests worked. Good news – though the story isn't over yet.

The effects of puberty blockers could hardly be of more profound significance these days. They've been handed out like sweeties to young "trans kids" at places like the Tavistock Clinic with the blithe assurance that they're reversible and absolutely fine, but, given how powerful they are, that has to be highly questionable to say the least. They effectively block the production of hormones – a kind of chemical castration -  during the key developmental phase of growing up. In addition, some studies have shown a negative impact on cognitive function in animals, and possibly in humans. This is serious stuff. Shouldn't more research be done before we risk this kind of powerful medical intervention on vulnerable children? 

Sallie Baxendale is a consultant clinical neuropsychologist and a professor of clinical neuropsychology at University College London, so she has some authority here, but when she pointed all this out, well, nobody seemed that interested:

Last year, I wrote a paper to summarise the results of these studies. The paper explained in relatively simple terms why we might think that blocking puberty in young people could impact their cognitive development. In a nutshell: puberty doesn’t just trigger the development of secondary sex characteristics; it is a really important time in the development of brain function and structure. My review of the medical literature highlighted that while there is a fairly solid scientific basis to suspect that any process that interrupts puberty will have an impact on brain development, nobody has really bothered to look at this properly in children with gender dysphoria.

I didn’t call for puberty blockers to be banned. Most medical treatments have some side effects and the choice of whether to take them depends on a careful analysis of the risk/benefit ratio for each patient. My paper didn’t conduct this kind of analysis, although others have and have judged the evidence to be so weak that these treatments can only be viewed as experimental. My summary merely provided one piece of the jigsaw. I concluded my manuscript with a list of outstanding questions and called for further research to answer these questions, as every review of the medical literature in any field always does….

I was surprised at just how little, and how low quality, the evidence was in this field. I was also concerned that clinicians working in gender medicine continue to describe the impacts of puberty blockers as “completely physically reversible”, when it is clear that we just don’t know whether this is the case, at least with respect to the cognitive impact. But these were not the only troubling aspects of this project. The progress of this paper towards publication has been extraordinary, and unique in my three-decades-long experience of academic publishing.

Yet although her paper has now been accepted for publication "in a well-respected, peer-reviewed journal", that was after three rejections. "I have never encountered the kinds of concerns that some of the reviewers expressed in response to my review of puberty blockers." These included the suggestion that she should "focus on the positive things that puberty blockers could do", and that she appeared to show an alarming "bias" towards caution.

I sincerely hope that any arrest in brain development associated with puberty blockers is recoverable for young trans and gender diverse people, who are already facing significant challenges in their lives. I would welcome any research that indicates that this is the case, not least for the significant insights that would present to our current understanding of puberty as a critical window of neurodevelopment in adolescence. Puberty blockers almost invariably set young people on a course of lifetime medicalisation with high personal, physical and social costs. At present we cannot guarantee that cognitive costs are not added to this burden. Any clinician claiming their treatments are “safe and reversible” without evidence to back it up is failing in their fundamental duty of candour to their patients. Such an approach is unacceptable in any branch of medicine, not least that dealing with highly complex and vulnerable young people.

There's a long piece in the Daily NK today on the subject of Kim Jong-un's daughter Kim Ju Ae, the non-appearance in public of his eldest son, and the question of succession. With the regular public appearance of the daughter with her father, the speculation has been that she's his chosen successor. The author here, Gil-sup Kwak, doesn't think so.

I have tried to keep a close eye on the movements of the North Korean royal family. My current theory on North Korea’s future succession is based on two things:

1. The North Korean succession system is set up so that only members of the Kim family can succeed each other in perpetuity.
2. In Korean society, children take the surnames of their fathers, so if Kim Ju Ae succeeds her father, her offspring (the fifth-generation heir) would lose the “Kim” family name.

Keeping these key factors in mind, I speculate that one of Kim Jong Un’s sons will eventually succeed him. There is no need to argue this point, it is simply a matter of when and how.

Also, of course, North Korea is a patriarchal society, and men have the power. A woman leader would be quite extraordinary.

There's a theory that, in fact, there is no eldest son – which would certainly explain why no one's ever seen him. The author thinks that's highly unlikely.

First, in patriarchal Confucian cultures ruled by hereditary succession, sons and grandchildren are often seen as symbols of marriage. Kim Jong Un married Ri Sol Jo in 2009. Similar to South Korea before the 1990s, couples typically have children immediately after marriage in North Korean culture. Additionally, North Koreans do not commonly use birth control. Therefore, if Kim Ju Ae (born in 2013) is their eldest child, it suggests that the Kims were childless for a significant period after their marriage. Considering that they have now had (a rumored) three children, the possibility of Ri Sol Ju or Kim Jong Un being infertile is low.

Secondly, the NIS’s own intelligence estimates contributed to my belief in the “unconfirmed eldest son theory.” Naturally, after his marriage to Ri Sol Ju, when the NIS weighed the possibility of the existence of the eldest son, South Korean intelligence likely considered a wide range of information. One key piece of evidence at the time was reports that the Secretariat (the department responsible for acquiring luxury goods for the Kim family from overseas) appeared to be purchasing childbirth and infant supplies.

Thirdly, it’s not logically sound to completely rule out the existence of a son based on Kim Ju Ae’s public behavior alone. A daughter is a daughter, and a son is a son. Kim’s daughter is a good symbol of youth, peace, and the future  (“Nuclear weapons are an all-purpose sword to be handed down to all generations”). She also has the unique advantage of portraying Kim Jong Un as a loving father figure while reinforcing the legitimacy of the Kim family’s perpetual succession. 

What if Kim Jong Un had brought a son with him instead of Ju Ae? Considering the spate of rumors surrounding Kim’s health, it would have been akin to “pouring gasoline onto a fire.”

A good point. Kim Jong-un, after all, is still relatively young. He should reckon on decades yet still in power. To bring his son along on publc outings would only fuel speculation about his health. And to see the son as a boy, small and weak, would not serve the image. Best to wait till he can be presented as a full-grown man – perhaps, in the spirit of Kim iconography, riding a white horse in muscular fashion to the summit of sacred Mt. Paektu.

To summarize, while Kim Jong Un suffers from morbid obesity and anxiety, we must not forget that at 39 years old, he is still a young leader. Based on the theory of succession, the nature of the North Korean political system, and past experience, I believe that Kim’s most logical successor will be his eldest son. If Kim Jong Un either did not have a son in 2010 or there is some sort of complication with his eldest son, the title of fourth-generation leader will be passed on to his son born in 2017. In this process, Kim Yo Jong, Kim’s emotional and political confidante, will likely act as the regime’s “libero” (a key player with no fixed position) as a manager of the Mt. Baekdu Bloodline and her brother’s political and emotional partner.

And the daughter, Kim Ju Ae, will probably take a role somewhat similar to that now played by Kim Yo Jong – a “libero” – to the new leader.

If  the regime survives that long…

After the Telegraph exposé of the Home Office asylum system last week – "the whole culture is rotten" – comes this Times report, "Revealed: How judges let criminals use Christianity to escape deportation":

Murderers, sex offenders and drug dealers are among migrants who have escaped deportation by claiming they have converted to Christianity, The Times has found.

They successfully argued that if they were returned to their home countries they would be persecuted because of their apparent conversion.

In one case, a Bangladeshi man who had served 12 years in prison for murdering his wife successfully appealed against the Home Office’s attempts to deport him, saying he was a Christian convert and that he would be at risk in his predominantly Muslim community in Bangladesh.

A judge allowed him to stay in the UK based on rights enshrined in Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which prevents removal where there are substantial grounds for believing that an individual would face serious harm from torture or from inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

In some cases, claims have been rejected as outlandish. One man’s appeal failed after a tribunal was told that he had spent a month going to a synagogue by mistake….

Analysis suggests that Iranians have been the most successful in avoiding deportation. In several cases, a claimant’s deportation was blocked even when the judge hearing their appeal concluded that their conversion was not genuine. Judges said that even the “perception” of being a Christian could result in lashes in Iran….

An Iranian man who was sentenced to four years in jail for drug and driving offences and resisting arrest managed to get his deportation order overturned despite referring to “Black Friday” rather than “Good Friday” and getting the denomination of his church wrong.

One asylum seeker admitted that he attended a synagogue for more than a month without realising that he was not in a Christian church.

One tribunal judge doubted that a claimant was “attracted to Christianity because it fulfilled a deep spiritual need”, given that they had told the court that “being a Christian is freedom and you can drink alcohol and be with girls”.

Some refreshing honesty, at least.