John Islip Street, behind Tate Britain:
Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
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Remember the astonishingly brave Kurdish women who were at the forefront of the battle against Islamic State? They haven’t gone away. From the Telegraph:
An all-female Kurdish militia that led the fight against Islamic State (IS) is refusing to lay down its arms against pro-government forces in Syria.
The Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), which numbered 24,000 at the peak of its war against IS, has vowed to keep fighting despite a deal between the Kurds and forces loyal to President Ahmed al-Sharaa.
The YPJ’s struggle is more than territorial, and signifies a broader battle for Kurdish autonomy and women’s rights, they said.
Ruksen Mohammed, a spokeswoman for the YPJ, told The Telegraph in the de facto Kurdish capital Qamishli: “As a woman, why did I pick up a weapon?
“Because I see my society, my autonomy, my identity are under threat. Maybe I have a father, brothers, but I have to protect myself. Nobody else can do it for me.”
Ms Mohammed said: “Our commanders and soldiers have played the largest role, in the war against IS, in the war against al-Nusra, on all frontlines. So we can’t accept an armed force without women.”
By contrast, Mr al-Sharaa’s government is ideologically opposed to women’s participation in the military, public and political life. It appears to be anticipating a more total transfer of power, with ethnic Kurds joining Damascus’s central armed forces on an individual basis.
In tense scenes on Monday, small numbers of Syrian government personnel entered the autonomous region. Shots were fired as Kurdish security forces clashed with pro-government groups, and members of the government convoy displayed the single-finger salute often associated with IS.
For now, members of the all-female fighting force continue to hold frontline positions in the tense stand-off with Mr al-Sharaa’s forces; patrol the streets of Kurdish cities, and secure IS detention facilities, including the camp home of former British schoolgirl Shamima Begum.…
She described Mr al-Sharaa’s forces as an “existential” threat to the Kurdish women, who have not only established all-female fighting forces, but also sought to establish unique all-female political and civil society institutions throughout northern Syria.
They’re fighting on their own. No one is going to come and help them…
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Extract:
We live in a time of egregious comparisons to the Holocaust when the Holocaust is repellently abused and minimized by cynical cretins – radiohosts, podders, politicians- to criticize anything from vaccination to ICE raids. But here is a comparison that stands in its scale and horror: in size and horror this does resemble the two days of Babi Yar near Kiev in Sept 1941 where 33,000 Jews were killed. It is also worth pointing out that an entire progressive movement arose against the autocracy of the Shah. And his was an autocracy. But in his forty year one reign, only around 3000 people were killed, mainly in the last year before his downfall. This week alone would have murdered in the streets, torturechambers, hospitals of Iran. It is very striking that the UN has barely commented on this; its sec-general has been shamed publically by dissident @AlinejadMasih; many countries have refused to vote against Iran; many of those formerly known as ‘progressives’ are silent or supporting the regime – incredibly; some famous so-called ‘humanitarian’ NGOs – many of them organizations i revered since my childhood; hello Amnesty where is your other ball now – are silent. In doing so, they have discredited any claim to humanitarian credentials and exposed themselves.
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From Saturday’s march in London, from the JC:
Chants of “long live the ayatollah” could be heard as demonstrators marched past Aldwych on their way to Downing Street.
These are people who think of themselves as progressive. But their hatred of Israel – of Jews – outweighs any sympathy they might have for the tens of thousands of Iranians slaughtered by the hard-line theocrats. It’s extraordinary. The pro-Palestine marches have been grim, for sure – “globalise the intifada”, “from the river to the sea” – but this a new low.
Talia Yosef, an activist who addressed the counter-protest, said of the pro-Palestinian marchers’ apparent lack of interest in the Iranian uprising: “It was never really about human rights. Why are these people silent about what is happening in Iran right now? Real people are risking everything – women, men, students, workers [are] standing in front of a regime that will imprison them, torture them and kill them, just for demanding basic freedoms.”
Yosef added: “They are silent because for them it was never about human rights. It was never about caring for the innocent…it is about being cool and trendy, about buying a $20 keffiyeh on Amazon and wearing it as a cute little scarf.”
Fellow activist Inon Dan Kehati, echoed her comments. He said: “The claim that they care about human rights for all rings empty and hollow…Right now, there are Iranians rising up in masses against the [regime] and they are being gunned down for it…Their response is silence.”
That’s being generous. Yes, cool and trendy, but it’s darker than that.
Kehati also claimed that the marches were “never about [helping the] the oppressed”. Instead, he argued they were “about being against Israel and the story of the Jewish people”.
Brendan O’Neill at Spiked:
It was an orgy of bigotry of the like we have sadly got used to since 7 October 2023. But this time even worse. This was, to all intents and purposes, a pro-murder rally. It was a march in defence of medieval religious violence. It was a mass act of excuse-making for the apocalyptic slaying of thousands of civilians. I don’t want to hear a peep from the brunching classes who will plead: ‘We were only there to show our support for Gaza.’ Because the minute you saw the flag of the Islamic Republic, the minute you saw the ayatollah’s face, the minute you saw mobs praising those butchers in Tehran, you should have fled. That you didn’t, that you were content to rub along with apologists for Islamist tyranny, speaks volumes. It suggests your unhinged loathing for Israel has fried every last one of your moral faculties….
Some say the Gazaholics of the activist class are being hypocritical. These people weep for the dead of Gaza but shrug their shoulders over the dead of Iran. I disagree. There’s moral consistency here. For in both their anti-Israel fury and their nonchalance over the butchery in Iran, these people are siding with the carnival of bloody reaction that is Islamist fanaticism. Their 7 October apologism and their shameful silence on the Iranian massacres spring from the same dark, warped source – a creepy sympathy for Islamism, a belief that this religious mania represents some kind of resistance to the West, to Israel, to capitalism, to modernity. Their anger over the war in Gaza and their coolness over the mass murder in Iran are both grim proof of the moral rot of identitarianism.
And grim proof of the moral rot of antisemitism.
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Thea Sewell in the Telegraph:
I came to Cambridge because I wanted to learn how to think, not what to think: how to weigh arguments, test premises, spot evasions and follow a thought wherever it leads, even when it becomes uncomfortable. I did not come to be preached at, or for slogans. I expected the university – which for generations has jostled for position as the best in the world – to be a place where everything was up for discussion. Although I had long-held settled views on the sex-gender debate, they were not something I dwelt on.
That changed over the Easter holidays last year, when I attended a talk featuring the writers Julie Bindel and Helen Joyce. I met women that day who changed the course of my life. Not because they proselytised, or demanded loyalty, but because they spoke plainly, without fear. It became impossible to remain comfortably disengaged. I read Joyce’s book – Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality – and returned to Cambridge with it, as well as Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls. Both women, as well as Bindel, have been pilloried (that’s putting it mildly) for stating the truth: that biological sex and women’s rights must trump gender identity.
Back in college, I showed the books to a friend. I had been self-censoring on this subject for some time: trimming sentences and avoiding questions. I believed that a careful, private introduction to these ideas would be safe. I was wrong. Soon after, I was systematically ostracised by people I had considered close friends. Many told me they could no longer speak to me because of my views. I was branded a Terf (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) and the word was scratched into the board on my door. I was told that buying books written by bigots was morally equivalent to being one. Argument was unnecessary; association enough to convict.
What unsettled me most was not the anger of the ideologically committed, but the quiet retreat of those who were neutral or privately sympathetic. Friends told me they still cared about me but could no longer be seen with me in public: the optics were wrong, the risk too great. This is how fear now operates at universities. Not through violence or explicit threats, but through social exclusion, which works especially well on young women. Silence perpetuates silence.
It’s the Red Guard mentality. Abuse and shaming for those who don’t follow the group-think.
Theoretically, Cambridge now has robust free speech guarantees. Much of this is thanks to Arif Ahmed, the Government’s free speech tsar, whose work has led to new legal protections. But it must be practised, not just protected. On campus, the practical reality still includes intimidation, blacklisting and taboo. The victory exists on paper; the culture has yet to catch up.
Our opponents’ responses are almost always slogans: rehearsed phrases and ritual denunciations. It is lazy thinking. Ideas only deserve allegiance if they can survive scrutiny, but this is impossible when you are stuck in mantra-mode. One of these mantras is “no debate”. Only last Friday, the university’s Labour club organised a protest demanding the de-platforming of a guest speaker – the Reform Party’s adviser Jack Anderton – at the Conservative association. The logic was protective, but the effect is infantilising.
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Daniel Sugarman at Jewish News:
The BBC has been unable to confirm whether its Arabic language channel will stop hosting a proudly antisemitic contributor who has talked about “the fear and cowardice of the Jews”, is an unabashed supporter of a proscribed terrorist group and publicly supports attempts to murder British author Salman Rushdie.
Ali Mattar, a Lebanese academic, has been a recurring contributor to BBC Arabic, with his latest appearance in December. However, Jewish News has seen a series of tweets by Mattar in which he glorified terror attacks against Israeli civilians, celebrated the former heads of both Hamas and Hezbollah, and said, of “Jews”, that “the day will come when they are dragged out of their holes.”…
Mattar has regularly praised terror attacks against Israelis. In July 2023, after a Palestinian drove a pickup truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Tel Aviv that day, Matar responded saying: “The operation in Tel Aviv is a stunning response because it defies what the enemy expected—that an operation would come in Tel Aviv”. In October 2024, he shared video footage of a ramming attack against Israelis which showed elderly civilians trapped under the lorry used in the attack. Matar captioned the video: “One of the most beautiful mornings”
Furthermore, on his social media Mattar endorsed and supported the 12 August 2022 murder attempt on Salman Rushdie, in which the author was stabbed 15 times. Rushdie has required constant protection since the late 1980s after the former Supreme Leader of the Iranian regime, Ayatollah Khomeini, instituted a fatwa – a religious decree – against him calling for his death. On 13 August, 2022 – the day after the attempted murder, Mattar tweeted: “Any true-believing Muslim, if they were able and the matter made easy for them, would not have delayed in carrying out Imam Khomeini’s verdict on that devil Salman Rushdie.”
The BBC claims to have tightened up its vetting of BBC Arabic contributors, while admitting that a Samer Elzaenen, who called for Jews to be burned “as Hitler did”, had somehow got through the net. Whoops. And while it seems that Mattar hasn’t appeared on BBC Arabic since early December, the BBC were unable to rule out future appearances.
Danny Cohen, former director of BBC Television and controller of BBC One, said: “‘The BBC has claimed that it has cleaned up its act and that terrorist-sympathising antisemites no longer appear on its channels. Yet only a few weeks ago this man was given a platform on BBC Arabic. Many in the Jewish community have lost faith in the BBC’s ability to uphold standards and ensure that anti-Jewish racists do not appear on its services. This latest evidence of the views of a man given prominence by the BBC will be sickening to many British Jews.’
A spokesperson for CAMERA UK said: “What Jonathan Munro described in parliament as the ‘very sophisticated tools’ regularly used by BBC Arabic and BBC monitoring, failed to identify an entire X account showing that one of BBC Arabic’s frequent interviewees is a Hezbollah mouthpiece and an unabashed antisemite.”
When contacted for comment by the Telegraph in January, Mattar said: “I am honoured to condemn Israel and to expose its true nature and crimes against Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and others. The BBC knows this very well, and I have the right to express my opinion with complete clarity and courage.”
With the BBC’s full imprimatur.
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Peter resigns again.
Time to revisit Robert Hutton in The Critic from last September, on the occasion of Mandelson’s resignation as US ambassador:
Some of us are old enough to remember where we were every time Peter Mandelson resigned. His departures from high office are like royal weddings: a chance to freeze a moment in our nation’s long story, to capture something of the people we have become. The author David Nicholls is rumoured to be working on a novel about a star-crossed couple who run into each other over the decades on the days Mandelson quits.…
Like any real genius, Mandelson gives each of his falls from grace its own unique character. There was the time he resigned over secret dealings with a millionaire, and then of course the time he resigned over his secret dealings with a millionaire. Now he has resigned over his secret dealings with a millionaire. It is hard to know what will cause his next downfall.
Perhaps, like Tony Blair before him, Keir Starmer will give Mandelson another job. And then, after he resigns from that, another-nother job. Although many will rush to criticise the prime minister today, there was simply no way he could have foreseen that a well-publicised friendship with America’s most notorious sex offender might turn out to be a political problem.
For my children, this is their first Mandelson resignation. I hope that they will treasure it. There will be others, of course, but there is something special about seeing the political mastermind illuminated by flashbulbs as a government car whisks him away and he pulls out his phone and tries to remember which of his mates is currently out of prison and not using their yacht.
Truly, we shall not see his like again. For at least six months. And then we pretty certainly will.
Just under five months, in fact.
Mick Hartley 