Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • At the King’s Head Theatre

    From Jewish News:

    A London theatre event featuring a play about LGBTQ+ Palestinians seeking refuge in Israel was disrupted by activists during a post-show discussion, prompting some audience members to leave early.

    The rehearsed reading of Sharif, written by Israeli journalist and playwright Tomer Aldubi, took place on Tuesday evening at King’s Head Theatre, following an earlier performance at JW3.

    The production explores the experiences of LGBTQ+ Palestinians who flee to Israel to escape persecution, drawing on real-life testimonies and years of research.

    The attendee said the evening “started out as a civilised, convivial event” before a number of individuals appeared to take over the discussion.

    “I was sitting next to one of them, and I could see he hadn’t come to experience the play,” they said. “His hand shot up the minute the Q&A began, and he read out a pre-written statement attacking Tomer and the state of Israel.”

    They added that others joined in, turning the discussion into “an outpouring of hateful rhetoric”.

    “What was meant to be an informed discussion degenerated into a vile onslaught of loathing and hatred towards Israel,” the attendee said.

    No interaction – just hatred. Antisemitic hatred.

    Aldubi told Jewish News: “They clearly came prepared just to attack. What is the point of pure hatred when this was meant to be a collaboration? They think they’ll achieve something by shouting and quoting me as if I were a politician… This creates more animosity towards Palestinians and won’t achieve anything good.

    “They simply don’t care about the queer community; not once did they acknowledge the fact that so many gay people cannot live authentically in the West Bank, Gaza, or any other Arab country. If they are so eager to talk about the occupation, they are welcome to do so. However, they cannot tell me what I can or cannot write about – especially since this was written with such sensitivity and based on years of research, interviews, and volunteering.”

    The event had been intended to encourage cross-community discussion around complex political and human rights issues following the performance.

    Hmm. Discussion is not possible with these people.

  • Erasing South Korea from the minds of young people

    Another day, another ideological campaign. The search for a totally compliant North Korean populace gets more and more feverish, as signs of deviance – watching a South Korean video, for instance, in preference to memorising the latest guidance from Kim Jong-un on achieving the perfect socialist society – continue to multiply.

    North Korea has ordered a sweeping ideological campaign to erase South Korea from the minds of young people, directing youth organizations to conduct weekly sessions aimed at purging South Korean cultural influence from those under 30, a Daily NK source reported Tuesday.

    A source in North Hamgyong province said that on March 22, authorities issued instructions to intensify efforts to sever all mental and cultural ties with South Korea in line with the regime’s declaration of South Korea as a permanently hostile state. “The government instructed that in accordance with the two-state declaration designating South Korea as an immutably hostile country, a campaign to completely wipe South Korea from people’s minds be actively pursued as a strong measure to permanently sever relations,” the source said.

    Under the directive, the Socialist Patriotic Youth League, the ruling party’s mass organization for young people aged 14 to 30, was ordered to run a nationwide campaign throughout April and May using youth-tailored ideological education materials. The goal, the source said, is to bind young people to the system as a vanguard force. The campaign’s stated aim is to treat South Korea as a “ghost-like existence” and to eradicate the very idea of a South Korean identity from the consciousness of North Koreans under 30.

    Specifically, the youth league was instructed to organize weekly lectures at workplaces and schools across the country with the message that “South Korean ideology and culture are a toxin that eats away at the soul.” Young people who had previously encountered South Korean dramas or music were to be encouraged to come forward voluntarily, confess their exposure, and undergo an ideological “cleansing” process.

    Brainwashing, it used to be called.

  • The Nazi legacy in the Middle East

    Yesterday, with Claire Berlinski, we heard about the Nazi influence in Iran. It was a significant factor also, of course, in the Arab world.

    Alois Brunner (SS-Hauptsturmführer, Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand man, and the “Butcher of Salonica” who personally deported ~128,000 Jews to death camps and ran the Drancy camp) was welcomed to Syria where he trained security forces in Gestapo torture and interrogation methods and helped build the regime’s repressive apparatus that targeted Jews and political enemies. He lived comfortably in Damascus for three decades as a free man.

    Leopold Gleim (Gestapo chief in Warsaw and head of Jewish Affairs in occupied Poland) was welcomed to Egypt where he converted to Islam and then organized Egypt’s secret police and internal security in the Nazi model and was also directly involved in pogroms against Egyptian Jews.

    Bernhard Bender (Gestapo special section chief for clandestine Jewish movements and deportations in Poland and the Soviet Union) was welcomed to Egypt where he worked in Egyptian security services’ political prisoners section and helped craft anti-Jewish policies and strategy while also contributing to repression and later the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands.

    Otto Skorzeny (SS-Obersturmbannführer and Hitler’s favorite commando leader) was welcomed to Egypt where he acted as a military advisor directly to President Nasser and helped build Egypt’s intelligence and special forces. He even helped train Palestinian Arab fedayeen terrorists in sabotage and guerrilla tactics.

    And not forgetting Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem during the 1920s and 1930s, who spent much of WW2 in Berlin:

    With the rise of Nazi Germany, al-Husseini became a devoted supporter and ally of Adolf Hitler. His aim was not simply to send Jews back to Europe, but to bring the Nazi Holocaust to the Middle East….

    While al-Husseini is only a marginal figure in the history of the Nazi Holocaust, he was among the most important Nazi propagandists in the Arab world. During the 1930s and 1940s, he played a major role in developing the modern Islamist movement, and in embedding anti-Semitism as a cornerstone of postcolonial Arab identity.

    After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, al-Husseini was detained in France before escaping to Egypt in 1946. Well after the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps had been publicly exposed, and while the Nuremberg war-crimes trials (which al-Husseini was arguably trying to evade) were still ongoing, Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, welcomed al-Husseini to Egypt. Al-Banna described al-Husseini as a ‘hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism’. ‘Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle’, he added.:

  • Trans history

    Story here:.

    The Tudor queen, who never married and established England as a rising imperial power, will be shown as a biological man in the six-part series next year….

    Claims of her being a trans woman will be a central focus of the new series, titled Majesty, in which the monarch will be played by a transgender woman, according to reports.

  • ‘Biology-denier’ Sturgeon

    Nicola Sturgeon is to host an event celebrating the historic struggles of women in science. Some people are not happy:

    Women’s rights groups have reacted with fury after it emerged ‘biology-denier’ Nicola Sturgeon will front a panel celebrating women in science. The former First Minister is hosting a high-profile panel discussion on Scotland’s overlooked female pioneers at the First Women of Science Festival in Edinburgh on Thursday, April 2.According to organisers Edinburgh Science, Scotland’s past is “filled with amazing women who changed the scientific path of history forever”. But Sturgeon’s selection as host has drawn fierce criticism from leading women’s rights campaigners, who accuse her of “denying basic biology” and abandoning scientific reality.They claim the Glasgow Southside MSP was the key architect of the divisive gender reform push, attempting to permanently “change scientific reality and biology in favour of gender self-identification”. Clare Blom, co-founder of grassroots campaign group Women Won’t Wheesht, said Sturgeon’s role was “fundamentally incoherent”.She said: “It claims to honour women’s historic exclusion from science while platforming figures who refuse to define what a woman is. The Edinburgh Seven were excluded because they were female. Their struggle was based on biological reality….

    Mary Howden, of the Women’s Rights Network Scotland, said: “It is deeply unfortunate, and frankly ironic, that an event celebrating the historic struggles of women in science – the Edinburgh Seven and all those who fought to be recognised in their own right – should be hosted by Nicola Sturgeon.”A woman who, to this day, cannot bring herself to state the biological reality that a double rapist is a man. A politician widely accused of putting ideology before the safety and rights of women and girls, and who has done more than most to undermine the very sex-based rights the Edinburgh Seven and generations of women fought for.”Ms Howden added: “The sting in the tale is all too clear. An evening supposedly honouring ‘first women’ and hidden female voices is being fronted by one of the most prominent deniers of biological sex in modern British politics.

    Mary Howden, of the Women’s Rights Network Scotland, said: “It is deeply unfortunate, and frankly ironic, that an event celebrating the historic struggles of women in science – the Edinburgh Seven and all those who fought to be recognised in their own right – should be hosted by Nicola Sturgeon.”A woman who, to this day, cannot bring herself to state the biological reality that a double rapist is a man. A politician widely accused of putting ideology before the safety and rights of women and girls, and who has done more than most to undermine the very sex-based rights the Edinburgh Seven and generations of women fought for.”Ms Howden added: “The sting in the tale is all too clear. An evening supposedly honouring ‘first women’ and hidden female voices is being fronted by one of the most prominent deniers of biological sex in modern British politics.

    “Pride in the progress made by women is rather soured when the host has spent years working to erase the legal and social recognition of women as a distinct sex class. One can only hope the Astronomer Royal and the other panellists focus on actual science rather than the fashionable fiction that now surrounds it.”

    The Edinburgh Seven “were the first group of matriculated undergraduate female students at any British university. They began studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869 and, although the Court of Session ruled that they should never have been admitted, and they did not graduate or qualify as doctors, the campaign they fought gained national attention and won them many supporters, including Charles Darwin. Their campaign put the demands of women for a university education on the national political agenda, and eventually resulted in the Medical Act 1876 that enabled women to be licensed to practise medicine.”

    They didn’t identify as women: they were women.

  • The Eye speaks out

    Read here about Graham Linehan’s contacts with Private Eye. Hislop didn’t think the trans debate was very important. Trans mania – rapists in women’s prisons, vulnerable children being told they needed medical intervention because they were “born in the wrong body”, pronoun people (they/them) – and the UK’s biggest satirical magazine looked the other way.

  • The Sheffield Jew hunt

    It is the first day of Pesach as they knocked on doors to disseminate anti-Semitic literature and to find “lack of support” i.e. Jews (or their supporters) and record their addresses.

    It is sinister and it is wrong and @syptweet [South Yorkshire Police] told me they had made the decision to allow it to proceed.

  • The Shia Believers

    An important essay from Claire Berlinski, on the eschatological beliefs that really drive the Iranian theocracy:

    “Down with Israel” has a specific theological significance. For Khomeneists, Israel’s destruction is an eschatological goal, not just a geopolitical one, because Israel’s destruction is the precondition for the Mahdi’s return…..

    No one in the West pays this kind of thing the slightest bit of attention, and this the strangest aspect of our long conflict with the Islamic Republic. For 47 years, it has made its beliefs and its goals unambiguous. What’s more, the behavior of the regime has been consistent with what it claims to believe. But the West just refuses to take any of this seriously. In all of the reporting you’ve seen on this war, have you seen even one article discussing the Mahdi? I haven’t.

    It’s as if, during the Cold War, we simply refused to believe that our adversaries were communists, refused to read a word of Marx, and never once considered that Soviet leaders might be serious about building a socioeconomic order based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Imagine trying to figure out what Stalin was doing without understanding the concepts of historical materialism, class war, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the vanguard party, or the laws of revolutionary development. Imagine insisting that Bolshevism was just a decorative vocabulary draped over ordinary Russian nationalism, or a kind of theatrical language no one was meant to take literally.

    We never talked ourselves into such stupidity. We understood that Marxism-Leninism was not incidental to the Soviet project; it was the project. You didn’t have to think that Marx was right to grasp that the men in the Kremlin believed he was, and to grasp that this was essential to understanding their behavior.

    But this is exactly the error the West keeps making with the Islamic Republic. We strain to explain its conduct in the terms modern Western elites find respectable: deterrence, regime survival, Realpolitik. Yes, all of those things matter. Iran isn’t exempt from strategic calculation. But the leaders at the core of the Islamic Republic are fused to something else: a theology of history, a cult of redemptive suffering, a metaphysical understanding of injustice, and a set of eschatological expectations that aren’t peripheral to their behavior, but the motivation for everything they do.…

    Americans are having a noisy debate about the conduct and wisdom of our war in Iran, and rightly so. But the solipsistic and impoverished quality of this debate is disheartening. We seem to think the regime’s theology is irrelevant and its propaganda is some kind of kitsch. The Islamic Republic’s ideology should be central to our analysis. Because it is not, we insist on negotiating with its leading figures as though they were technocrats from Brussels. Then, absurdly, we’re surprised when they do exactly what they’ve been saying—slowly, loudly, and for nearly half a century—that they intend to do.

    And, the Nazi connection:

    The Islamic Republic’s antisemitism is also, in some measure, imported, and imported from the most catastrophic source imaginable. Astonishingly, Adolf Hitler was once believed to be the Twelfth Imam.…

    The German historian Matthias Küntzel, working in the tradition of Jeffrey Herf, has done interesting work on this period. Like Herf, Küntzel argues that modern Islamist antisemitism is not merely traditional Islamic anti-Jewish theology; it is qualitatively different, a product of the encounter with Nazism. The claim cuts against two comfortable notions simultaneously: the first says that Islamist antisemitism is purely a response to Israeli policies; the second that it’s merely traditional Islamic theology. Küntzel says it’s neither: There’s a specific historical moment of contamination that explains the genocidal intensity. The Islamic Republic’s obsession with Jews, fed by reinforcing streams, is an overdetermined hatred.

  • Tightening ideological control over the creative sector

    From the Daily NK:

    North Korea has ordered all writers and artists to complete an intensive ideological training course by early April, as the regime moves to tighten ideological control over the creative sector in line with resolutions from the Ninth Workers’ Party Congress, a source in Pyongyang told Daily NK on Monday.

    “The party’s propaganda and agitation department and the culture ministry under the cabinet announced that all writers and artists are expected to attend an intense ideological training course by the beginning of April to help them carry out the resolutions of the Ninth Party Congress,” said the source.

    The order was issued in early March, in accordance with leader Kim Jong Un’s declared drive for the “all-out development of socialism.” Its stated aims are to block the influx of foreign culture, eliminate non-socialist elements, and build a Juche culture insulated from ideological contamination.

    The directive also calls for “erecting a cultural wall with South Korea” in support of the ruling party’s policy of treating North and South Korea as “two hostile states.”.

    So what’s the most important task for these creatives?

    The order further calls on the artistic community to intensify efforts to build a personality cult around Kim Jong Un. Writers and artists are expected to complete major works this year highlighting the regime’s achievements over Kim’s 15 years in power, including a large-scale collective theater production and a novel representing the Kim era.

    What else is culture for?

    But there are problems:

    North Korea’s crackdown on South Korean pop culture has done little to dim young North Koreans’ enthusiasm for BTS, with sources inside the country reporting that the globally popular K-pop group has become so embedded in youth culture that those unfamiliar with them risk being labeled out of touch by their peers.

    According to a Daily NK source inside North Korea, BTS has worked its way into daily life among young people not only in border regions but in the capital, Pyongyang, where being unaware of the group is enough to leave someone on the outside of peer conversations.

    Oh dear.

  • A profound safeguarding failure

    Joan Smith at UnHerd on the long-delayed grooming gangs enquiry:

    Yesterday, in what could be the most consequential political announcement in years, the grooming gangs inquiry announced that it is to examine whether ethnicity, culture or religion facilitated offending. The inquiry will also ask whether those issues influenced the response of individuals and organisations that should have stepped in to stop the abuse of girls who were affected. Speaking on the changes, Baroness Longfield said that the inquiry will look into “patterns of abuse” and the common factors that contributed to the formation of these gangs.

    From what we know already, it is hard to see how the answer to these questions could be anything but “yes”. Previous inquiries into grooming in specific locations have shown how girls reported horrors, including multiple rapes and being passed around groups of men for sex. An inquiry into abuse in Rochdale revealed that a girl was judged to have “consented” to sex with dozens of men, while the authorities described her abuse as a “lifestyle choice”. Similar stories have emerged from criminal cases that ended with groups of men, many of them of Pakistani origin, being sent to prison.

    Yet, it’s been almost 12 years since the publication of the Jay Report that revealed the staggering extent of the abuse. So why has it taken so long for the state to ask questions that could prevent further scandals?

    What the inquiry should be getting to the bottom of is how group dynamics work. Particularly, how abusive men find each other and select their victims. In this instance, the common factors are often ethnicity and familial ties — something revealed by the fact that so many of the offenders are related to each other. It’s easier to cover up criminal acts if members of the gang are brothers, cousins and uncles, many of whom eventually appeared in court together. Furthermore, this clearly isn’t a problem in one part of the country alone. It’s recently been suggested that grooming gangs have operated in London, suggesting that the true extent of the scandal has yet to be exposed.

    Now that the remit of the inquiry has been expanded, the connection alleged by many victims, between police officers, councillors and local authority employees, will be analysed. Many of these people knew each other and mixed socially. The answer to these questions is a particular problem for Labour, which ran many of the towns where grooming scandals erupted.

    Many Labour politicians have a history of simply refusing to accept any ethnic dimension to this scandal, of largely Muslim men of Pakistani ethnicity raping young white girls. It’s all a “racist dog whistle” from the far right.

    In several towns, Labour politicians are accused of ignoring allegations for political convenience. In the current climate, any such finding would be explosive and electorally damaging even for those unconnected. Police, too, face renewed calls for a root-and-branch overhaul of their response to victims.

    The inquiry is likely to expose a profound safeguarding failure. Whether driven by collusion or by a reluctance to challenge influential local figures, the effect is the same: a systemic breakdown with potentially seismic political consequences.

    Expect delays, prevarications, obfuscation…