Mick Hartley

Today is World Hijab Day: slogan, "veiled in strength".

New York Governor Kathy Hochul "acknowledges the bravery, nobility and strength of Muslim women around the world who make the personal decision to wear the hijab." 

And if they make the personal decision not to wear the hijab, in Iran or Afghanistan for instance, they'll get beaten and imprisoned. Maybe tortured. Maybe killed. Such nobility. Such strength.

Khadija Khan at Spiked:

The hijab, a type of head covering, is used by Islamic regimes around the world as a tool to subjugate women. From Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to Afghanistan and Iran, the hijab symbolises women’s oppression. It represents a misogynistic ideology in which women are conceived as sexual objects to be concealed from men.

So you might think that Western progressives would be more than a little critical of the hijab. But incredibly, that isn’t the case. On the contrary, today many are eagerly celebrating World Hijab Day. No doubt they will even present wearing the hijab as a form of female ‘empowerment’.

This is liberal hypocrisy at its cruellest. Hijab laws and customs sustain a gender-based hierarchy. That’s why so many brave women in Iran have been trying to challenge their own nation’s hijab law. But rather than support their struggle for freedom, Western liberals have largely kept quiet.

Not wearing the hijab is "offending religious morality" according to the mullahs in Tehran and the Taliban in Afghanistan. It's the same for Muslim women everywhere – a sign of subservience and oppression. 

Yet these stories and many others like them have been met with silence by Western progressives. These people claim to be on the side of female victims of male oppression – except, it seems, when the perpetrators are Islamists. They call out all manner of male behaviours in the West as sexist – from ‘manspreading’ to ‘mansplaining’ – yet they are silent when it comes to the most egregious examples of violent misogyny in Islamic societies. The double standards here are off the charts.

A much-needed conversation about women’s rights in Islamic regimes is being brushed under the carpet. Indeed, self-described progressives appear to be more concerned with not upsetting Islamist bigots in the West than they are with the plight of the women living under Sharia law. In the eyes of the politically correct left, those women in Iran fighting to liberate themselves from religious fanaticism are unworthy of solidarity.

Worst of all, those Westerners who do speak out against this misogyny are routinely shouted down. Non-Muslims and even ex-Muslims will be told that they have no right to speak out against Islam. Invariably, they will be accused of being ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobic’.

Western liberals need to get their priorities straight. Out of cowardice and ignorance, they are effectively appeasing the oppressors of women. They are caving in to the will of fanatics. They are allowing those who routinely violate women’s dignity to get away with it.

The latest from the Daily NK:

The North Korean authorities are holding intensive study sessions to reinforce ideological discipline among the country’s young people, Daily NK has learned. The ideological study material says that viewing or sharing movies, television shows, or news programs from other countries is completely unacceptable.

“The headquarters of the Socialist Patriotic Youth League has called for intensive study sessions that are designed to uproot the capitalist and bourgeois ideologies implanted in young people’s heads and to equip them with a patriotic ideology and the belief that the Korean people are the best in the world,” a source in North Pyongan Province told Daily NK on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons. 

In line with those orders, the provincial branch of the Youth League has been drafting a study plan for each level since Jan. 22.

The study material sent by the Youth League states that “the bourgeois and capitalistic ideologies that are lurking among young people today are giving rise to non-socialist behavior. We need to find and quash the basic behaviors that are giving rise to non-socialist behavior.”

In the study material, The Youth League emphasized that “the most severe of the behaviors that need to be fundamentally quashed is watching or sharing movies, television series, and news articles from capitalist countries.” Such acts are “completely intolerable because they are unpatriotic and fail to regard our nation as number one.”

The Youth League continued: “This year, we will use these intensive study sessions to sweep away the dangerous ideological elements concealed inside the minds of young people and to boldly transform them into young people who unconditionally follow in the footsteps of our supreme leader.” …

The Youth League branch in Taechon, North Pyongan Province, gave all league members in the area the following introduction to the study sessions.

“We need to be fully armed with the revolutionary ideology of our beloved comrade, the general secretary. We will prepare young people of the next generation to stand in the vanguard and take the lead in becoming absolute believers, resolute achievers, and ardent defenders of party policy, which encapsulates the ideology and line of our comrade, the general secretary.”

The Youth League’s Taechon branch said, “The ideological instruction of young people is the most important and critical issue in the course of the revolution. Young people need to carry on their struggle while living according to party policy because that arms them with an indomitable weapon for victory and prevents them from becoming the ideological playthings of the imperialists.”

“We will reinforce our ideological training offensive to fill the ideological vacancy and eliminate mental wandering among all young people in Taechon and to enable them to live lives befitting young people of North Korea, who remain strong in body and mind and keep their eyes on the prize no matter how difficult things become,” the Tachon branch emphasized.

More of those big Chicago trains from Jack Delano. November 1942. "Chicago, Illinois. Locomotives in an Illinois Central Railroad yard."

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

An MP – a minister – steps down because of threats from Muslim extremists:

A minister has said he is stepping down at the next election after becoming the subject of death threats and intimidation over his pro-Israel views.

Mike Freer, the parliamentary under-secretary for courts and legal services, will leave parliament after incidents including an alleged arson attack on his constituency office last month.

The MP for Finchley & Golders Green told the Daily Mail that he felt “lucky to be alive” after narrowly escaping a confrontation with Ali Harbi Ali, who murdered the Conservative MP Sir David Amess in October 2021.

The killer visited Freer’s constituency office with the intention of killing him before targeting Amess. Last month’s fire at Freer’s constituency office was “the final straw”, the MP said. The circumstances surrounding the incident remain unclear.

Freer, 63, later received an email saying that he was “the kind of person who deserved to be set alight”.

Freer said he had a serious threat against his life in 2011 when the group Muslims Against Crusades told him to “let Stephen Timms be a warning to you” and urged supporters to target him. Timms, a Labour MP, was stabbed by an al-Qaeda sympathiser in 2010 but survived.

A sitting MP stepping down because of threats from the far right, or white supremacists…what a uproar there'd be. But this….just a small piece in the back pages.

Update:

In a turn of events that's nothing short of horrific, Mike Freer, the Tory MP for Finchley and Golders Green, is being forced to step down. Why? Because he's found himself in the crosshairs of Islamist extremists. These thugs, blinded by hatred, wrongly assumed he's Jewish. It's… pic.twitter.com/vxrcZVS9ZW

— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) January 31, 2024

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

London planes in Finsbury Park this morning:

A fine Times editorial today. In full:

For a moment in March last year, it appeared that sanity had broken out in the health service. Steve Barclay, then relatively new to the job of health secretary, ordered NHS England and related health bodies to review their involvement with Stonewall. The charity, originally created with the laudable aim of fighting discrimination against the gay community, had been captured by the ­extreme trans lobby and was disseminating its ­unhinged ideology throughout government by means of a racket called Diversity Champions.

This involved private and public bodies, ­including Whitehall departments, universities and the BBC, paying thousands of pounds for Stonewall’s seal of approval as models of “diversity and inclusivity”. Rightly, Mr Barclay considered that the money flowing into Stonewall’s coffers might be better used treating patients. He therefore advised the health bodies not renew their memberships of the scheme. Scroll forward to now and NHS England is still in the grip of Stonewall’s deranged “gender neutral” language. It continues to exclude the word “woman” from its staff ­domestic abuse policy, as if it were a dirty word.

It is of course correct that domestic abuse can affect anyone. But women are overwhelmingly more likely to suffer violence in the home. No ­responsible literature dealing with the subject should impinge on this grim reality. But in its drive to be a “Top 100” Stonewall employer, NHS ­England insists on using language peddled around the public sector by the charity.

In the minds of the NHS chiefs buying into the pressure group’s distorted world view, domestic ­violence apparently happens “regardless of ­gender”. This dangerous nonsense has rightly been called out by Nia, a domestic and sexual ­violence charity.

This attack on common language usage can be seen ­elsewhere in NHS England guidance. The term “pregnant woman” is, it appears, no longer acceptable and has been replaced by “pregnant employee”. The NHS is chock full of people with a detailed knowledge of human anatomy and the one thing they are likely to agree on is that when a person is pregnant that person will be — beyond a shadow of a doubt — a woman.

That this kind of offensive wokery is allowed to exist in taxpayer-funded literature is a standing rebuke to the government. When will ministers grasp this nettle once and for all, and banish all trace of Stonewall and its lunacies from the public sphere? Victoria Atkins, Mr Barclay’s successor at the health department, should lay down the law to all health bodies, insisting that the traditional ­language of male and female be reinstated ­immediately into all official publications.

Thankfully, Stonewall’s extremism is resulting in it being spurned by many of the 320-plus public bodies that between 2018 and 2021 pumped more than £3 million into the charity. Not before time. It is a lobbying entity, not a dispassionate provider of expert advice. But in an effort to maintain its relevance — and income — after the general ­acceptance of gay rights, it succeeded in ­reinventing itself as an arbiter of the trans debate. That there is a need to defend the word “woman” shows how successful it has been in banishing common sense from bodies fearful of trans McCarthyism.

Ms Atkins must turn the tide on this insanity once and for all. Her fellow women expect no less.

US universities, like British universities, have been increasing their intake and hence the proportion of overseas students. Many of these students, as it happens, come from the Arab and Muslim worlds, and these students have been at the forefront of the anti-Israel pro-Hamas demonstrations that have been disfiguring campuses since Oct. 7th. The universities have been remarkably understanding of these students, considering the laws in place against those who support terroris organisations. 

Tony Badran at Tablet:

You could argue there are ideological reasons for the schools not to take action against foreign students. “Palestine,” after all, has found its place at the heart of progressive “intersectionality.” But there’s also a strong material incentive for the universities’ failure to obey the law.

The average share of international students in Ivy League schools who enrolled in the fall of 2023 is about 15%. The overall international share is higher. A quarter of Harvard’s student body is now international. At MIT, it’s nearly a third.

The scheme by which U.S. taxpayers pay to give 25% or more of the places at America’s most prestigious universities to foreign students is a recent innovation—one that took shape between 2004 and 2014, and has helped make the universities’ DEI rhetoric cost-free. The international share of freshmen at Georgetown nearly quadrupled from 3% in 2004 to 11% a decade later, with similar numbers at Berkeley and Yale. The growth in undergraduate enrollment at Yale during that decade was fueled almost entirely by foreigners. In that same period, the number of incoming foreign students at Ivy League schools rose by 46%.

Behind this increase lies the simple reality that only a comparatively small number of Americans can afford the mind-numbingly high fees that American universities extort from their captive domestic market. Foreign students, the overwhelming majority of whom are either the children of wealthy foreign elites or directly sponsored by their governments, represent a serious source of funding for American colleges, public and private alike. These students often pay full or near-full tuition and board, and help public universities balance the books in the face of budget cuts. More broadly, they augment revenue by helping to fill federally funded programs that are based on racial and ethnic quotas.

Depending on how you look at it, American universities have made either an exceedingly clever or else exceedingly reprehensible bargain: Quota-filling at a profit. While this practice is generally covered with asinine bureaucratic language such as “promoting diversity” and “fostering a cosmopolitan culture” for a “global community,” it is in fact a racket by which universities take slots presumably intended for members of groups that are held to be economically and culturally deprived—and on which the universities would be obligated to take a loss—and instead sell them at a profit to the families of some of the more privileged people on Earth, while also continuing to sell identity-politics platitudes as institutional ideology.

It seems obvious enough that foreign students who can afford the cost of full tuition and board without financial aid often come from the elite segment of their societies, which in authoritarian countries often translates into overlap with the ruling regimes. When it comes to the Middle East especially—though hardly exclusively—this privileged class is both outwardly “Westernized” and soaked in the antisemitism prevalent in their home societies….

And it’s not just tuition money that schools are milking. Foreign governments also write big checks to ensure that their students—and their politics—are given red-carpet treatment at big-name universities. According to the National Association of Scholars, since 2001 Qatar has given around $5 billion to American universities, more than any other foreign government. Between 2014 and 2019, American colleges and universities received $2.7 billion in Qatari funding without any public acknowledgment of the source of those funds. Given that Qatar hosts the leadership of Hamas, one can see how cracking down on Hamas-sympathizing students might seem like a bad idea for university presidents who cash Qatari checks.

And, should the universities feel any concern about protecting these students and their antisemitic and terrorist-supporting chants – which might get them into trouble as being complicit in their activities – up steps Biden.

But what the schools also know is that they have political cover from the Biden administration to violate the country’s visa and terrorism laws. On Nov. 1, three weeks after the Oct. 7 pogrom and the eruption of antisemitic, pro-Hamas street action in U.S. cities, the White House unveiled “the first-ever National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia in the United States.” The initiative, with its inversion of reality, gave a green light to pro-Hamas protesters while telegraphing to the university administrators that the former were members of a protected class—rather than a danger to public safety….

The real victims, you see, are the brave students chanting genocidal slogans in public; the villains are the people who attempt to “dox” them by posting footage of their noxious statements and behavior online.

Beyond Utopia: Escape from North Korea, shown on BBC4 last night, was a superb piece of documentary film-making. The journey of the family from the border Yalu river across China and through Vietnam and Laos to Thailand – with the hero pastor – was extraordinary, only made bearable by the knowledge that, if they'd been caught, we wouldn't be seeing all this video footage. On the other hand the mother trying to reunite with the son she'd left behind was just heart-breaking.

A main take-away was the scale of the bubble that North Koreans live under. The family, still, couldn't shake off their old beliefs. The grandmother was shaking her head about how things got so bad for them, considering that Kim Jong-un, a very intelligent young man, was doing his best to make them happy. The two children, asked about what they thought about Kim, said he was the greatest man in the world. It wasn't till they got to South Korea that they started to realise just how wrong they'd been. It was, they said, impossible for people in North Korea to believe that in the outside world people lived so well. If they somehow got a glimpse of life outside, they'd automatically assume it must be faked.

Which is why, of course, the regime goes to such draconian lengths to ensure that no outside culture, and particularly no South Korean culture, can ever be seen.

Marjory Collins, November 1942. Lititz, Pennsylvania. 

"Small town in wartime. Peanut stand next to the Lutz butcher shop finds it hard to get peanuts since the war started. Peanut oil is needed in industry."

"Lititz Springs Pretzel Company, owned by Lewis C. Haines (background), who is unloading a tray of pretzels which has come up on a dumbwaiter from the baking room below. A son, Bob, weighs them and packs them in cans. Lititz was the first town in America where pretzels were made."
[Photos: Shorpy/Marjory Collins for the Office of War Information]

UNRWA, the agency dedicated solely to Palestinian refugees, is finally being exposed as central to the current Gaza situation. UN Watch's Hillel Neuer – "American taxpayers have been subsidizing educators who call for the murder of Jews. Suspending these funds isn’t enough. UNRWA must be abolished for good."

Since 1950, UNRWA has provided the bulk of social services at Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, including the crucial task of teaching Palestinian children and adolescents.

But the notion that it is primarily an agency for the relief of refugees is a front. UNRWA’s main task is political. Palestinians who work for UNRWA call it “the main political witness to our cause.”

UNRWA exists to perpetuate Palestinians as refugees. Unlike the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which since World War II has been responsible for the welfare of all refugees in the world, and has worked toward their resettlement and relocation, UNRWA deals only with the Arabs from Palestine and has a completely different objective.

Millions of Palestinians who attend UNRWA schools in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza are taught that the war of 1948 is not over, and that they have a “right of return”—meaning, to dismantle and take over Israel.

The UN betrays its mission by signaling to the Palestinians that the war is not over, and to keep fighting.

UN Secretary General António Guterres said he was “horrified” to discover that UNRWA employees participated in the invasion and massacre of October 7. But in reality, their actions merely translated UNRWA’s core message into action….

Earlier this month, Middle East analyst Eitan Fischberger discovered a Telegram chat group of UNRWA educators in Gaza. “Let me tell you,” he quipped on X, “they sure do love Hamas and October 7th.” Saying he didn’t have the time to examine the material, he tagged me to ask if we could take it on.

We did. What we found was a chat group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers with discussions about when to expect their next UNRWA salaries mixed together with messages, photos, and videos celebrating the Hamas massacre of October 7 and other acts of terrorism.

My colleagues at UN Watch worked diligently with professional Arabic translators to sift through more than 249,000 user posts in the chat group.

Tomorrow I will present our findings before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, at a joint hearing of its subcommittees on oversight and international organizations. It’s not pretty. UNRWA teachers routinely encourage and promote Hamas terrorism. […]

UNRWA employees have held Israeli hostages captive in their homes, using UNRWA facilities to move them from place to place.

From the protection of UNRWA schools, Hamas shoots at IDF troops and fires rockets at Israeli towns. The floor above a UNRWA kindergarten in Gaza was booby-trapped with explosives by Hamas. UNRWA facilities are routinely used to conceal weapons.

UNRWA resources have been used to build and supply Hamas attack tunnels, many of which are constructed underneath UNRWA facilities. UNRWA bags have been used to conceal Hamas military vests in a medical clinic, and to hide explosive devices, AK-47 rifles, and a rocket-propelled grenade. The IDF located dozens of rockets hidden in a home under boxes with UNRWA markings. A Hamas rocket launching site was positioned in a UNRWA warehouse, and another very close to a UNRWA-run school.

The UN almost never speaks out, however. “It would put our staff in jeopardy to call out Hamas for use of our buildings or schools,” a UN official told CBS News.

In October, this fear apparently caused UNRWA to delete its announcement that Hamas had stolen fuel, medical supplies, and other humanitarian aid intended for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Gunmen are routinely seen commandeering aid trucks entering UNRWA facilities in Gaza, or carrying off sacks of UNRWA food.

The reason UNRWA has become an unofficial arm of Hamas is that for too long, the UN and the U.S. government have turned a blind eye to the rot inside the agency.

People naturally assume that a UN agency dedicated to refugees must be a Good Thing. But it's clearly part of the problem – a major part of the problem – not part of the solution.