Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Wearing the hijab

    And maybe get every child who’s forced to wear a hijab to go without one for a while. Or doesn’t it work like that?

    At the risk of pointing out the blindingly obvious, the thing is that the hijab isn’t some neutral cultural artefact showing your identity, like wearing a cross or a star of David, but a symbol of female subjugation. It’s got misogyny written all over it, in flashing lights. In Iran woman are imprisoned and shot for refusing to wear one.

    Why doesn’t this ridiculous woman know this?

  • In the Sudanese camps

    Christina Lamb – It feels like humanity has died in Sudan.

    For a long time, Souad told no one why she cries in the night. “If you tell anyone what I did to you, I will kill you as I did others,” the fighter from the Rapid Support Forces had warned as he brandished a gun and a knife over her small bloodied body.

    “I know your house and you see how we kill you people,” he said. Souad had seen. At just 12, she had already witnessed bodies piled on the streets as RSF and other Arab militia swarmed into her home town of El Geneina, capital of West Darfur, in April 2023 at the start of Sudan’s bloody civil war.

    Those slaughtered were non-Arabs like them, mostly members of the Massalit tribe to which she and her family belong, so they fled. Her mother fell ill and died, so Souad, her brother and three sisters moved in with their aunt and uncle. Fighting continued to spread from town to town. One day in November 2024, Souad went to the local market to buy falafel to feed her siblings.

    “When I got there, it had been taken over by fighters from the RSF,” she says. “One of them grabbed my wrist and pulled me into an empty shop.” He raped her, then issued his warning…

    Now 13, Souad, who should be at school playing with her friends, instead sits plucking at the hem of her long black and white dress, eight-month-old baby Suma on her shoulder. A child herself who cries every night, with a baby daughter born of the worst day of her short life.

    We meet in the Zahra Centre for survivors of sexual violence, a small shelter of woven grass inside the Spontaneous Camp, started by Zahra Khamis, a Sudanese psychologist whose own 17-year-old son was killed as they fled. Her small volunteer team is helping 350 survivors but that, she says, “is the tip of the iceberg”. The UN estimates that more than half the women and girls arriving from Sudan are victims of sexual violence, many too ashamed to speak….

    The situation inside Sudan is even worse. “In all my decades [in the field] I have never seen a bigger gap between the need and what’s being given,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, almost in tears after spending five days inside the country, in Kordofan, the latest frontline in Darfur, meeting civilians who had managed to flee.

    Darfur is no stranger to violence. The RSF has its origins in the Janjaweed, a militia that launched a similar spree of killing in 2003-05. That time, celebrities including George Clooney and Brad Pitt got involved. This time is very different.

    “It feels like we don’t matter,” says Fuda, 20, as she lifts her orange scarf to show me vivid scars on her right shoulder and right side of her ear. A high school student when the war started, she and her family first fled to Ardamata, a garrison area of El Geneina, where they thought they would be safe. But then the RSF came and they fled again. The first village they got to was being burnt and looted by the RSF and in the chaos of ­running away, she was separated from her mother and siblings.

    Speaking so softly I have to lean in, Fuda recounts how a pick-up of RSF fighters blocked her way. “They grabbed me, three of them, and began beating me then as I was lying bleeding, they took turns in raping me.” Left with a broken shoulder and unable to walk, she was eventually taken in by a local woman. When the bleeding did not stop for 21 days, the woman arranged for a driver to take Fuda to Adré, where she spent 15 days in a clinic and was reunited with her mother and one brother who had also made it out. Her other siblings are still missing…..

    I’ve said it before, but really, whoever’s doing the PR work for the Arabs is doing a fantastic job. Here they carry on a brutal war of the utmost barbarity against the local black African population that’s been going on for decades – well, centuries – and no one cares. Meanwhile they’re the greatest victims the world has ever seen in Palestine. Hamas showed the same barbarity, with the same sexual violence, against the Jews on October 7th, and they’re the heroes of the western left.

  • So very keen to house male murderers in women’s prisons

    Alex Massie in the Times – Repellent policy on trans inmates shows SNP chooses men over women:

    I do not know why John Swinney and his government colleagues are so very keen to house male murderers in women’s prisons, but I do know this is a question the first minister should be asked every day until the Scottish parliamentary election on May 7. If it is asked often enough, perhaps an answer will finally be forthcoming….

    Voters should know that if they vote for the SNP (or the Green Party), they really are voting for men convicted of some of the most heinous crimes to be housed in the female prison estate simply because these men have decided they are in fact women themselves.

    Not, one suspects, because these men are suddenly overcome by feelings of gender dysphoria. It’s a bit more cynical than that.

    As a political matter, this is obtuse; as policy it is repellent. But this is the reality of modern Scotland, a place where ministers can argue they are obeying the Supreme Court’s confirmation that sex is a question of biology while simultaneously doing all they can to avoid following the law.…

    The Scottish government has spent years arguing that there is no clash of rights between women and trans people and yet here it is expressly, explicitly, arguing that trans murderers’ rights trump those of women. There is a clash of rights and the government has picked a side. That is its prerogative, but SNP politicians cannot complain if and when voters notice that the government believes women should recognise that men’s need for validation is considered more important than women’s safety and dignity.

    As far as the government is concerned, women who object to this should know their place and pipe down. Ministers argue that testimony from female prisoners unhappy at being imprisoned alongside men is “irrelevant”. It is hard to see how the government could more clearly signal its contempt for women. Their rights are contextual and qualified, whereas the rights of men who think themselves women are absolute and unequivocal.

    We’ve been seeing this for years from the SNP, yet the Scots keep voting them in…

  • I’m Iran

  • The frontline of a global ideological struggle

    A provocative opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post from David Ben-Basat – Hatred of Israel has become a proxy war on the West:

    Israel is no longer merely “the small Jewish state in the Middle East.” Against its will, it has become the frontline of a global ideological struggle between democracy and ideological militancy, between freedom and totalitarian thinking, between Western values and forces seeking to dismantle them from within.

    In a bitter historical irony, Europe – the continent that bore responsibility for the Holocaust, the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history – has once more become one of the main centers of modern antisemitism. This is not the crude, overt antisemitism of the 20th century, but a sophisticated form, wrapped in the language of “human rights,” “universal justice,” and the “fight against colonialism.”

    In the name of historical guilt and in a culture of nearly unlimited tolerance, a paradoxical reality has taken shape in Europe: Jews are once again being targeted, not because they are seen as “foreign” but because they are identified with a state that refuses to apologize for its right to exist and defend its citizens….

    This moral vacuum is being filled by a radical Islamist ideology that divides the world into only two camps: believers and infidels.

    Under this worldview, anyone who is not Muslim – and certainly anyone who does not accept the supremacy of Sharia Law – is deemed an infidel.

    The takeover of Western Europe is a gradual process: mass immigration, the creation of closed communities, demands for special rights in the name of religious freedom, the erosion of civil law, and ultimately the imposition of religious norms on the public sphere. This is not the pursuit of coexistence but a long-term strategy to replace Western values from within.

    If Europe provides the ideological backdrop, American campuses have become the testing ground. Universities built on the values of free speech, pluralism, and critical thinking have deteriorated into arenas of silencing, intimidation, and open incitement.

    Jewish students report boycotts, threats, and exclusion – not on the fringes but at the heart of prestigious academic institutions. Faculty members and administrators choose silence, fearing they will be labeled “insufficiently progressive.”…

    For radical movements and Western elites that have lost confidence in themselves, Israel is a convenient target. It is easier to attack “Zionism” than to confront the failures of immigration policies and religious radicalization.

    Western values are increasingly portrayed as “oppressive.” Thus, hatred of Israel becomes a tool for undermining the very idea of the West.

    It’s true that a loss of confidence in western liberal democracy has coincided with a resurgence of fundamentalist Islam – “Islamism” – with the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Saudi and Qatari petro-dollars spreading Wahhabism and the like.

    After the break up of the Ottoman Empire and the triumph of the west, the Muslim world had nowhere to go. The muscular days of a triumphant Islam were in the past, and there was no capability within Islamic doctrine to go forward and meet or compete with the west – so they went back. They regressed to the 7th century. And now we have theocratic tyrannies like Iran, misogynist hell-holes like Afghanistan, and a forever Palestinian war against Israel, now driven by Hamas fanatics prepared to sacrifice as many Gazans as it takes to drive out the Jews.

    The tragedy is that this has proved attractive to western progressives – in particular in the academy, where decades of post-modern ideologies have eaten away at enlightenment confidence. And there was always that antisemitic undercurrent which we assumed had disappeared, but have, since October 7th, discovered had not.

    So here we are…

  • One of over 40,000

    Just one – of tens of thousands.

  • School Number 4

    The irony-meter has broken. From the Times:

    Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984, has been celebrated for decades as a symbol of resistance to oppression, but Russian schoolchildren are now being taught that he behaved “destructively” because of his disobedience.

    In what looks like a disturbing return to Soviet attitudes, pupils at schools across the Tomsk region in western Siberia were taught about Smith’s negative tendencies as part of training designed to “raise anti-terrorism awareness”.

    1984 was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988 but circulated in clandestine samizdat editions before that and was cherished by dissidents.

    It was the most popular fiction download from the website of the Russian online bookseller LitRes in 2022, the year President Putin invaded Ukraine, but officials have tried to claim its popularity was thanks to it being a critique of modern liberalism, rather than communist totalitarianism and other forms of autocracy.

    School Number 4, in the city of Tomsk, said in a social media post that children were shown a series of films, including Harry Potter, Batman Begins and the version of 1984 that was released the same year, starring John Hurt.

    The sessions were designed to help children work out “why heroes become criminals” and “how to recognise signs of destructive behaviour”, it said.

    Children were told that Smith was a “radical” whose destructive bent was evident in the fact that he single-handedly tries to resist a totalitarian regime, he “changes information in official documents, which contradicts the main idea of the party” and he “feels a strong hatred for the party”.

    His attempts to “undermine trust towards the party, which leads to a revolution” were also cited.

    Irina Grabtsevich, 57, the director of School Number 4, is a member of the Tomsk city council from the United Russia Party, which dominates Russia’s legislatures and slavishly supports Putin.

    Under Putin, state bodies such as prosecutors and the investigative committee have consistently been deployed to crush dissent, while state television is used to smear critics of the authorities….

    Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, said in May 2022: “For many years we thought Orwell was describing totalitarianism. This is one of the global fakes. Orwell wrote about the end of liberalism. He wrote how liberalism would lead humanity into a dead end. He wasn’t writing about the Soviet Union but about the society in which he lived.”

    Time to revisit Christopher Hitchens on North Korea and 1984.

  • Burning the evidence

    “…intensifying fears that bodies may have been burned. Earlier, Islamic republic’s state television openly admitted in a broadcast that the authorities are facing a shortage of space to store bodies.”

  • The UK drags its feet

    It takes a comedian, Omar Djalili, to point this out. No one else is interested:

    4 days ago The Times reported “Britain to ban Iran’s revolutionary guards”.

    The UK have not proscribed the IRGC. The European Union has, as has Australia, Canada and the United States. Our Foreign Secretary even stressed that the we must act in concert with our allies in this regard.

    Apparently the UK is discussing “the difference between a state based actor and a terrorist based actor.”

    Hear it from Iranians: The IRGC IS the Islamic regime.

    Hitler gave orders, the Gestapo (his police force) and the SS (his paramilitary group) carried them out. Both acted for the Nazis and both were designated as criminal organisations at the Nuremberg tribunal.

    Are we saying that the UK government will designate the IRGC a terrorist organisation only after an international tribunal? How many more have to be killed before we act?

    As the UK drags its feet, the question must be asked: what are we hiding?

  • Intimidating the women prisoners with impunity

    The Scottish government once again beclowns itself. From the Times:

    A female prisoner has told how biologically male inmates allowed inside a women’s wing made her life a “living hell”, in sworn testimony to the Court of Session.

    The woman, who is being kept anonymous, said biologically male prisoners who identified as female were allowed to intimidate their peers with impunity even after one physically “battered” another inmate.

    SNP ministers attempted to prevent the harrowing testimony from the woman, originally sent to a young offender institution as a 17-year-old and returned to prison again in 2022, from being allowed in the case.

    However, Lady Ross overruled their objection that her evidence was “irrelevant” to the legal challenge being brought by For Women Scotland to Scottish prisons policy, which allows some men to serve sentences in the female estate if they identify as transgender.

    Irrelevant? The contempt for women could not be more clear.

    The woman, referred to in court documents as AA, described unwanted sexual attention from one male prisoner, referred to as MP1, who had “one hell of a big build” and started “transitioning” in jail, wearing “a tight top and jeans and high healed [sic] trainers”.

    She said: “MP1 fancied me. I was scared. He saw that. He threatened and intimidated me. He fancied me the way a man fancies a girl. He would expose his body parts, and wear skin tight leggings, so that everyone could see the shape of his penis. That’s sexual assault or indecency.

    “I felt unsafe with these men around me. MP1 did threaten me with sexual abuse.”

    One one occasion, the woman said MP1, a “lifer”, “battered a lassie when I was there”. “I seen [sic] it with my own eyes,” she said. “So did the officers.”

    However, the female victim was moved to another prison, with worse conditions, as “punishment”, according to the account. “MP1 stayed, he was not punished,” the testimony states.

    This is Iranian/Taliban level misogyny. Women are guilty of arousing the men’s violence: they must be punished. Never the men.

    The witness described a second male prisoner, referred to as MP2, who thrived on “power and control and intimidation”. She said the behaviour reminded her of a past toxic and violent relationship, in which she had been tied to a radiator naked. “A million per cent this was a bloke behaving like a bad bloke,” the woman said. “I felt totally unsafe.

    “I felt I had no privacy from these men. Of course, I felt unsafe. My space was eroded. There was no way I could avoid them. Women have to put up with this. Put up. And say nothing. Och aye, our space was eroded — 100 per cent.”

    In its legal arguments, the Scottish government has compared the presence of biological men in female prisons to a mother taking their young son into a female changing room. Neither, the devolved government claims, would necessarily threaten the dignity of women.…

    Rhona Hotchkiss, a former governor of now-closed HMP Cornton Vale women’s prison, also provided a sworn affidavit to the court. She recalled multiple examples of prisoners confiding in her about their “feelings of anxiety, distress and fear that resulted from having males accommodated next to them”.

    Hotchkiss said she had previously been supportive of trans rights in jails, only to have changed her mind completely as a result of her personal experience.

    She said: “In my experience … it is simply not possible to negate the risk to women’s mental and/or physical wellbeing that this practice [housing men in women’s jails] poses, and in my view, implementation of this elevates concern for males over the wellbeing of women.”

    Of course it does.

    Added: from the Telegraph:

    Biological sex is an “artificial parameter” for deciding where prisoners should be held, Scottish National Party (SNP) ministers have told a court.

    Gerry Moynihan KC, acting for the Scottish Government, argued that there should be flexibility to allow transgender women, who are biological men, to serve their sentences in female jails.

    He told the Court of Session in Edinburgh that defining “a man as a man and a woman as a woman, without exceptions” was “artificial”.

    Mr Moynihan argued that classifying a trans woman inmate as a man was “a fundamental denial of their choice of gender and it’s a fundamental denial driven only by semantics”.

    Completely mad. It’s precisely the other way round. Biology is the reality: transgender is the “fundamental denial driven only by semantics”.