Mick Hartley

It was a big secret, apparently:

A four-year-old was allowed to join a Church of England primary school reception class as a girl without the other parents and children being informed of their male biological sex.

A mother at the school in the southeast of England said the child became friends with her daughter and other girls and was invited on play dates, according to The Daily Telegraph.

The child is now in Year 3, where pupils are aged seven or eight, and was reported to have “flashed” at girls, and told them of their “deep secret” while in the school lavatories.

The mother told the Daily Telegraph: “The fact that a boy was being enrolled as a girl aged four, that alone for me is a massive red flag. Because I don’t see how a child of that age can make that decision … to actually go through a social transition. I just want my daughter to be a child.”

She said her daughter started behaving oddly in the present academic year, and eventually revealed that she knew her classmate’s “secret”. The mother has removed her daughter from the school.

A spokesman for the school said: “We are aware of the concerns raised and are already looking into them. We are in contact with relevant authorities and have an ongoing open dialogue with all parents involved.

“The safety and wellbeing of all of our pupils is our utmost priority and we take any reports of bullying and safeguarding concerns extremely seriously. All are dealt with in line with statutory and local guidance, and our policies and procedures.

“We are unable to comment on individual pupils and are proud we are an inclusive school and welcome all children to join our school family.”

Proud to be "an inclusive school". There's the give-away.

From the Jerusalem Post:

The IDF has established a humanitarian corridor in recent days for Palestinian residents of western Khan Yunis to move from combat areas to the town of Al-Mawasi in southwestern Gaza, IDF Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee announced on Saturday.

Adraee said that Gazan residents would be safe in Al-Mawasi and that the corridor has been opened to evacuate civilians every day so that the IDF can focus on fighting the Hamas terrorist organization and deepening its incursion into Khan Yunis without the risk of civilians being injured in the process.

Tens of thousands of Gazans have already passed through this corridor safely, according to the spokesperson.

Adraee also quoted a number of Gazan civilians passing through the corridor, who informed IDF soldiers that Hamas was preventing them from leaving combat areas, using threats and violence. Additionally, IDF soldiers were also assisting civilians at the scene, including the elderly and sick

But, you know, "genocide".

"The people want to topple Hamas," can be heard from the Palestinian civilians chanting.

COGAT official Major-General Rasan Aliyan said that "In recent days, we see more and more evidence of public criticism voiced by the residents of Gaza against the terrorist organization Hamas. The residents of the Gaza Strip rightly prefer their well-being and the safety of their children over the continued military strengthening of Hamas and the terrorist activities that harm them and their future."

It’s Holocaust Memorial Day. This year, I’m thinking of a woman called Sulamita Szapiro. Here she is as a student. We weren’t related and I don’t even know much about her, but I’m pretty sure that remembering her still falls to me. This is a thread about why. pic.twitter.com/HMNqKbnxCS

— Hugo Rifkind (@hugorifkind) January 27, 2022

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Full thread:

Sulamita was born in Warsaw. Her father was a teacher, and she went on to be one, too. I think she was also a writer, maybe a journalist or a poet. I think this because somebody with her name wrote for Nasz Przegląd, a Polish-Jewish newspaper. I think it was her, but who knows?

I do know, though, that when war broke out she had only one living relative. That was her brother Nuiniek, a lawyer, married to Andzia. 

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust database, tells us that he’d go on to die in the Otwock ghetto. She’d be gassed in Treblinka. So I guess, for the reasons this thread explains, it’s my job to remember them, too.

I also know that Sulamita had a boyfriend, an engineer. When the Nazis invaded in 1939 she was seven months pregnant, although they were unmarried. Perhaps it’s wrong for me to feel that suggests a bohemian outlook, but that’s what I imagine, because you latch on to what you can.

They married the next day, and fled to Lviv, in the half of Poland now occupied by Russia. Here they sheltered in what would become the ghetto, along with tens of thousands of Jewish refugees. Their baby – a daughter – was born here.

Eventually, of course, the Nazis would take Lviv, too, and the liquidation of the ghetto would be horrific. In my understanding, almost nobody from it would survive. Sulamita and her little family were already gone by then, though, deported by the Russians to a gulag in Siberia.

I don't know much about this period. Sulamita's boyfriend – now her husband – was put to work as a woodcutter, and was hurt by a log. I don’t know what Sulamita did. I doubt it was pleasant. Maybe she was lucky, and a teacher there, too?

In 1941 Russia changed sides, the gulag was opened. Like many other stranded Jews, Sulamita and her little family went South West, to escape via the Middle East. A horrible journey, thousands of miles. Contemporary accounts talk of bodies falling from cargo trains, “like sticks”.

This story doesn’t end well. Sulamita only made it as far as Karmine, in what is now Uzbekistan. Here, I believe, she died of typhus. So did her child, at the age of two. I do not know, and will probably never know, where they were buried, or even if they were.

I don’t even know for sure that this is really what happened. Perhaps the child was thrown from a train, or given to a villager, or lost in a crush, and death was easier to explain. We know these things happened, more often than anybody will say. You have to consider it.

I do know, though, what happened to the now widowed, now childless engineer who had started the war as her boyfriend. He kept going. He crossed the Caspian Sea to Tehran, travelled through Iraq and collapsed in hospital in Palestine. Then he joined the RAF, and came to the UK.

He was my grandfather. Jozef. Here he is after the war in Rio, with the only survivor from his own family, his brother Leon. He’d go on to meet my lovely grandmother, a Polish exile pianist, and they’d have my mum. He died when I was three. I am now one of six living descendants.

Sulamita, though, has no living descendents. No family survived. Until I learned of her existence a couple of years ago, there was not one person in the world left to remember her name. Nor to know the name to that child, who my grandfather wouldn’t speak of at all.

To repeat, nobody alive knows more about these people than I do. And I know almost nothing. It's in living memory, but there is nobody to remember. This is what genocide means. This is what the Holocaust means. It’s a story of eradication. It wasn’t thwarted. It worked very well.

So, that’s why today I’m thinking of Sulamita, because otherwise nobody will. Here she is again. Maybe you’ll think of her, too. Thanks for reading.

Another violent woman:

A woman accused of fatally stabbing her mother more than 50 times and then tossing a butchered dog out of a high-rise building initially claimed the victim killed herself, cops said.

Andre Eugene, 36, gave conflicting stories over what happened before she was charged with murder, aggravated cruelty to animals and criminal possession of a weapon, police said Wednesday.

But…

Eugene was described by police as a transgender woman who had recently transitioned.

So he's a man. Not a woman – and not a woman's crime. Though it is, well, a strange one.

Eugene, who has worked as a teaching assistant at P.S. 17 for the last 10 years, told the retired cop her mother had committed suicide, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters Tuesday.

“I don’t need any help. My mother is dead. She committed suicide,” Eugene apparently told the neighbor.

But inside the apartment officers discovered Hyman’s body covered in blood and 58 stab wounds — with 26 wounds the head, Kenny said.

Outside the building investigators found a small curly-haired tan dog lying dead in the snow after it had been stabbed nine times and thrown off the apartment’s 11th-floor balcony.

Eugene had a dog bite on her thigh and several “shallow” stab wounds to her chest, Kenny said.

Eugene was taken to Brookdale hospital and treated for her injuries.

Eugene told police the fight started after her mother’s dog bit her. Eugene said she then stabbed the dog, and then her mother stabbed Eugene back, Kenny said.

Still, investigators determined Eugene’s stab wounds to be “self-inflicted”, Kenny said.

Janice Turner on Jo Phoenix, and the wave of recent court cases challenging gender ideology:

Summoned for a “quick chat” by her deputy department head, the criminology professor Jo Phoenix was told that her presence at the Open University (OU) was like a “racist uncle at the Christmas dinner table”. In other words, she was an embarrassment, a bigot whose outdated views her younger more enlightened colleagues tolerated with gritted teeth while they waited for her to retire or, ideally, die.

Professor Phoenix, 59, wept — and who can blame her, since her life’s work is not predicated on some hoary old belief system which the “arc of the moral universe” will shortly leave for dust but on stone-cold fact. Her specialist fields are prisons, prostitution and criminal justice, where data must be disaggregated by sex or it makes no sense. Female and male offenders differ in the crimes they commit, what leads them to offend and how legal systems treat them. Until about five minutes ago, believing that sex is often relevant in public policy wasn’t subscribing to hateful gender critical beliefs, it was (and remains for 99 per cent of us) self-evident truth.

Yet the employment tribunal which this week found the OU guilty of victimisation, harassment and discrimination is an insight into an academic world so addled by postmodern theory and so certain of its moral righteousness that it could bully and ostracise a distinguished lesbian professor until her mental health collapsed and she quit….

Cowardice, malice, revenge — an employment tribunal contains all human life and, regardless of outcome, is a reliably fascinating insight into how organisations are run. Phoenix, just like the philosopher Kathleen Stock, who was hounded out of the University of Sussex, notes that colleagues never challenged her in person — “although I embrace disagreement” — confining their attacks to Google docs or bitchy emails. One senior professor told her that faculty felt about her rather as colleagues of Charles Murray — an American political scientist who believes black people are genetically less intelligent — feel about him. Mean Girls has nothing on liberal academia. Likewise, the [Allison] Bailey tribunal taught us that Stonewall grasses up its adversaries to their employers and that a male colleague with whom you’ve shared an office for years may eavesdrop on private conversations and relay them on your boss. So many silent Stasi.

The most jaw-dropping tribunal yet is current: the case of Roz Adams, a counsellor who claims constructive dismissal by Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC). This puts a spotlight on a service led by trans woman Mridul Wadhwa, who believes that female victims objecting to being counselled by males must “reframe their trauma” and who laments that her clientele are overwhelmingly white women. (Scotland is 96 per cent white.) The tribunal heard that when a 60-year-old rape victim asked if the ERCC was female-only she was told it was trans-inclusive and later received an email saying she was unsuitable to use its services. When another client asked Adams if a person who identifies as non-binary was a woman, she asked permission to reassure her that this person was female at birth. Merely for acknowledging biological sex Adams was disciplined for transphobia….

"Her clientele"? His clientele. Wadhwa is a man: doesn't even have a a Gender Recognition Certificate, but still got the CEO post at ERCC despite it being advertised as a post for a woman.

Phoenix has found safe harbour at the University of Reading, where she was greeted by campus security and given a personal alarm. Here the vice-chancellor manages to balance academic freedom with the right to protest. To Phoenix’s great delight, she was congratulated on her tribunal victory both by academic colleagues and her students, a new generation who, she feels, reject totalitarian thinking. Not an embarrassing uncle after all but a rather cool and courageous aunt.

From the Times today:

The United States has said it is suspending funding for the main UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees after 12 of its employees were accused of taking part in the October 7 attack on Israel.

The United Nations confirmed earlier that it had taken action against the employees. “I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay,” Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said without specifying the number involved.

It's not just a few bad apples: the whole institution is rotten.

The agency provides health and education to residents of Palestinian refugee camps across the Middle East, including in Gaza and the West Bank.

They look after health and education so that Hamas, supposedly the government in Gaza, can get on with the business of killing Jews. In the UNRWA schools they teach hatred of Jews and the glories of martyrdom. And why, some 75 years after Israel was founded, is there still a need for an organisation solely dedicated to Palestinian refugees? None of the other great population transfers of the 20th century still require all that money and all those people – certainly not the Jews expelled from Muslim countries. It just perpetuates the Palestinian refugee status, used by the surrounding Arab states as a justification to refuse assimilation of their fellow Arabs and to deny the legitimacy of Israel.

Update: and now the UK too. Maybe the tide is turning. 

Jack Delano, January 1943. "Conductor handling engineer copy of train orders before a Chicago and North Western freight pulls out of Chicago for Clinton, Iowa. Since the track between those points is under automatic train control, the engineer hands the conductor the key to the automatic train control lock of the engine. The conductor will keep the key in the caboose until the train arrives at its destination."

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

This was a point waiting to be made. Ruth R Wisse at Tablet – Kafka at the International Court of Justice:

“Are you reminded of Kafka’s The Trial?” a reporter asks me, echoing cries of “insane” and “Kafkaesque” that I’ve been hearing from many of my fellow Jews about proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) where South Africa has accused Israel of committing genocide for defending itself against the explicitly genocidal attacks of Hamas. But no, the case before the ICJ is not like the work Kafka wrote in German in Prague during the First World War. Der Process was angst; this is evil….

Joseph K.—the deracinated Jew with a truncated identity who stands politically and metaphysically at the mercy of forces he no longer understands—became a universal symbol of modern man’s fate at the hands of the very institutions he looks to for guidance. But Kafka himself came to realize the implications of what he had written, and by the time of his death in 1924 he was studying Hebrew with the intention of moving to Palestine. Several members of his Zionist circle did move to Jerusalem, and one brought with him Kafka’s archive, where it now rests in the National Library of Israel.

By the time Kafka’s sisters were murdered in Auschwitz, several waves of Jews had established the infrastructure for statehood in the land of Israel that had been under foreign occupation for 2,000 years. That return of the Jews to political sovereignty is one of the great chapters in human history. Had the Arabs, their fellow Semites, accepted the principle of coexistence, the Middle East—numbering one Jewish state among more than 20 Arab neighbors—would have flourished in peace and prosperity. Instead, Arab and Muslim factions still compete over who can best whom at destroying the Jews….

The Arabs’ strategy of martyring generations of their own people in the cause of eliminating Israel dates back to the 1947 refusal of Arab leaders to accept the partition of Palestine into two states—in order to keep Arabs perpetually homeless. Arabs were to remain permanently displaced as evidence of Israel’s “occupation” while Israel integrated the over 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands and granted participatory citizenship to over 2 million Arabs who chose to remain in its boundaries.

Taking this tactic of martyring their fellow Arabs to a new level, Hamas turned Gaza into suicide central. Above ground, residents were allowed to conduct a quasi-normal life, knowing that, below ground, every school, every hospital, and many private homes were booby-trapped for the Israelis whom their leaders would lure into their cities. The IDF continues to uncover a tremendous amount of infrastructure built over years, confirming Hamas’ intention of invading and killing Israelis en masse. In the words of one of its soldiers “[It] is clear they expected us to arrive and laid plans to exact a cost in the form of IDF casualties.” The attack of Oct. 7 had to be monstrous enough to provoke Israel into full-scale war in the hope of rescuing the hostages and destroying the terrorists—a plan that would also ensure the collateral death of as many Gazans as possible to attract Western sympathy.

The Palestinian Authority’s “pay to slay” policy that rewards terrorists for the murders they commit will support every Hamas rapist and killer and their families. Making a travesty of international law that calls for the protection of citizens and prevents the use of human shields, breaking treaty arrangements and forbidding Red Cross access to prisoners, Hamas ridicules any hopes Israelis may invest in the West’s civilizing structures, which were designed for the protection of minorities and to which modern Jews did indeed look for fair treatment. In this sense, like Kafka’s Joseph K., they have been betrayed by the very institutions where they hoped to find justice.

Now the government of South Africa has weighed in with its support for Hamas and its accusations of Israeli genocide, and now the U.N.’s International Court of Justice prosecutes this charge, blatantly sabotaging the cause of justice it was created to serve. A century after Kafka’s death, there is nothing Kafkaesque about this trial, the falsity of which is plain to all. Israel stands in its own eyes and must stand before the world not as defendant but as righteous plaintiff against “those who demonstrate total disdain for life and for the law.” Unless Israel prevails, the political calculations that have allowed this travesty can only embolden the murderers and their supporters, condemning the world to ever greater evils—and not against Israel alone.

We know about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini, his links to the Nazis, and his determination to bring the Holocaust to the Middle East. Here's another Nazi link to Palestine and anti-Zionism, from Patricia and Gerald Posner at the JC:

In all the commentary about the roots of Islamic extremism that fuelled October 7, one important element has been overlooked: how the eliminationist anti-Jewish policies at the core of Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups is the product of a secret post-Second World War plan executed by a Swiss financier and ex-Nazis to incite Arabs to believe that the independence of their own countries was possible only without Jews in the Middle East.

This is not some wild conspiracy theory. It is based on two years of research into François Genoud, a Swiss banker who laundered looted Nazi treasure. A tip from a Catholic priest with a chequered past — criminal convictions for smuggling stolen art and trafficking heroin — kicked off our investigation into Genoud’s efforts to make Arab nationalists the new warriors in a Holy War against Israel and all things Jewish.

Lausanne native Genoud was a zealous 17-year-old admirer of National Socialism when he met his idol, Adolf Hitler, in 1932. Two years later, on a trip to Palestine, he met Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. They had a common enemy: Jews. Genoud became a militant advocate for pan-Arab independence….

Genoud’s wartime Nazi intelligence handler Paul Dickopf had become the director of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police in 1965. A month before the first PFLP hijacking, Dickopf was elected chief of Interpol. No one knew about Dickopf’s Nazi past. He made a deal with Genoud: Interpol refused to investigate any Palestinian terror attacks, deeming them “political matters”.

The same year as the Olympics attack, five PFLP terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa 747 with 188 passengers at Bombay’s airport. The following day, a ransom letter from Cologne demanded $5 million and included explicit instructions that rivalled anything from a John Le Carré novel. The PFLP freed the crew and passengers after it received the $5 million ransom. Genoud did more than fund the hijacking. He had driven overnight to Cologne with his wife carrying the ransom letter. After sending it to Lufthansa, and a copy to news agencies, the couple took off to the Belgian Ardennes for a holiday.

One unidentified intel agency had enough of the surge in terrorism and Genoud’s role. It leaked information about Dickopf’s SS past, forcing him to resign. Genoud had lost his most important police contact. The Mossad opened a Genoud file shortly after the Munich Olympic massacre. He was also on the intelligence radar of half a dozen Western and Eastern bloc nations. The authors discovered that the US National Security Agency had intercepted a telephone call that raised suspicions that Genoud might have had foreknowledge of the Olympics attack. The intelligence agencies played a complex game of chess over Genoud through the 1970s, as they suspected his financing behind dozens of hijackings, assassinations, car bombs and hostage situations. Genoud encouraged Arab nationalists to cooperate with European terror groups such as Germany’s Baader-Meinhof and Italy’s Red Brigade….

In 1987, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded Hamas. Genoud told colleagues he liked Hamas’s commitment to driving all Jews from the region. “A free Palestine,” Genoud reportedly told a colleague, “is one without Jews.”

And now tens of thousands of demonstrators in London, New York, Toronto, are carrying on the tradition, chanting the same line.

We've come across Australian trans surfer Sasha Lowerson before, complaining that he can't compete against women now he's getting too old to cut it with the men. It's the usual "living her full truth" bullshit:

Sasha Jane Lowerson doesn’t identify as a transgender woman, just simply a woman with a “trans-experience”.

“I am human. I’m a woman, just like you, I don’t want to be treated any differently,” Lowerson told AAA.

But the Mandurah surfer is making a difference for all transgender people with her quest for more equality in her sport. In her former life, Lowerson was among the top longboard surfers in the country and the world but now living her full truth, as her authentic self, she said the sport that helps her feel “as free as a bird” is now caging her in like a criminal.

“I’ve been hiding in this male shell up until a year ago, for 42 years. To still be made to be that guy that I’m not, it’s shattering,” she said.

He continued his "inspiring" journey, winning easily in the women’s division of the Western Australian longboard titles. 

It seems like he's still doing OK for himself. Everybody loves a man who grows his hair long so he can compete against women:

Iconic Australian surf brand Rip Curl has come under fire after featuring a transgender boarder in a campaign to promote women's surfing.

Sasha Lowerson, 44, featured on the Rip Curl Women Instagram page on Thursday as part of the company's Meet The Local Heroes of Western Australia campaign.

It comes just months after Rip Curl dropped former brand ambassador Bethany Hamilton – one of the world's most famous surfers – reportedly over her opposition to transgender people competing in women's sport.

Ms Hamilton, who lost her left arm in a 2003 shark attack but returned to professional surfing, threatened to boycott the World Surf League in February last year after a ruling allowing trans athletes to compete in women's competitions.

Rip Curl is just the latest Aussie brand draw the ire of fans over gender issues, after Seafolly was slammed last year for working with non-binary influencer Deni Todorovič and Moana Bikini featured a male model in a swimsuit this week.

Ms Lowerson, a professional surfer, first appeared in a Rip Curl social media post in August last year where she detailed how surfing in WA had shaped her life.

Not everyone's happy:

However, the short was met with backlash from Rip Curl fans who believe Ms Lowerson should not be competing alongside athletes who were born women.

'I was a college athlete. This hurts because it's not like women can join men's sports and win. We are not built the same way as men. Give trans their own league,' one person wrote.

'Yeah, I stand with Bethany Hamilton on this. Not cool,' another said.

'The reason Rip Curl Women exists is you wanted a space for women to relate and be on equal ground with each other. It's not about exclusion, it's about acknowledging our differences,' another wrote.

To be fair to Rip Curl, they are just following the trend in Australian sportswear ads. Here "non-binary influencer" Deni Todorovič for swimwear brand Seafolly: