Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • The scale of killing

    From the Jerusalem Post:

    As many as 30,000 people may have been killed across Iran during a two-day crackdown on January 8 and 9, TIME reported on Sunday, citing two senior Health Ministry officials and a separate compilation of hospital data shared with the publication. The figures have not been independently verified and far exceed numbers publicly cited by authorities.

    The number, if true, would massively increase the death toll from previously believed estimates. Days after the alleged massacre, Iran International estimated around 12,000 deaths from the two-day period.

    The officials said the scale of killing overwhelmed the capacity to handle the dead, exhausting body bag stocks, and prompting the use of eighteen-wheeled trailers to move bodies. TIME reported that security forces used rooftop snipers and trucks mounted with heavy machine guns after authorities cut communications. An Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps official warned on state television that anyone entering the streets should not complain if a bullet hit them, according to the report.

    A hospital-based count shared with TIME listed 30,304 deaths as of Friday, January 9, said Dr. Amir Parasta, a German-Iranian ophthalmologist who compiled the data. “We are getting closer to reality,” he said, while adding that the tally likely excludes cases from military hospitals and unreachable areas. Public health specialists quoted by TIME cautioned against over-extrapolating from hospital records but said the internal figures point to mass killing over a short period.

    Experts struggled to find historical parallels for so many people shot to death in such a brief span. TIME noted that the only comparable event in online mass killing databases involved the execution by gunfire of some 33,000 Jews during the Holocaust at Babyn Yar outside Kyiv on September 29 and 30, 1941.

    As not covered by the BBC.

    Hillel Neuer:

    I said to UNHRC: “We ask the U.N., the media, celebrities, campus activists: why are you silent? The answer is uncomfortable but clear. The Iran protest movement shatters a cherished narrative. A people rising against Islamist tyranny does not fit the ideology—so it is ignored.”

  • A comprehensive rejection of political Islam

    Full text:

    …It is a comprehensive rejection of political Islam as a governing ideology, articulated by millions who have endured its cruelty. In that sense, the uprising in Iran is a global reckoning.

    Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has ruled through systematic violence. It has executed tens of thousands of political prisoners, including the mass executions of the late 1980s carried out after sham proceedings lasting only minutes. Peaceful dissent has been criminalized, with journalists, lawyers, students, and labor organizers imprisoned for speech alone. Torture—beatings, sexual violence, mock executions, and prolonged solitary confinement—has been a routine instrument of governance. These are not deviations from the system; they are its design.

    Women have borne a particularly brutal share of this repression. The regime enforces compulsory veiling through surveillance, harassment, imprisonment, and lethal force. Women have been killed in custody for alleged dress-code violations, denied legal equality, and treated as wards of the state. Girls like myself have been shut out of educational and professional opportunities that existed before 1979, and women who resist have been publicly humiliated to deter others. When Iranian women rise up today, they are rejecting a system that criminalizes their existence.

    The regime’s violence has never stopped at Iran’s borders. It has spent decades exporting terror as state policy, funding proxy militias, training death squads, and prolonging civil wars across the Middle East. These interventions have destroyed cities, collapsed economies, and displaced millions. The resulting refugee crises have reshaped politics and social cohesion across Europe, allowing the regime to externalize the human cost of its ideology.

    At home, the state has hollowed out society through corruption and repression. National wealth has been looted by clerical and military elites while ordinary Iranians face inflation, unemployment, and collapsing infrastructure. Environmental devastation has been ignored because accountability would threaten regime power. When workers strike or farmers protest water theft, the response is bullets and prison cells.

    What makes the uprising so significant is that it dismantles the regime’s central lie: that political Islam represents moral order or cultural authenticity. Iranians know from lived experience that it produces neither justice nor dignity, only fear and stagnation. By rejecting clerical rule and theological coercion, they are exposing Islamism as an authoritarian ideology sustained by violence.

    This has profound implications for the West. For decades, Western governments treated the Islamic Republic as a stabilizing fixture, prioritizing short-term convenience over moral clarity. That approach has failed. Supporting the Iranian people is not interference; it is a refusal to subsidize tyranny through silence.

    The Iranian uprising matters because it shows that Islamism can be confronted and rejected by those who know it best. The West should support this movement out of strategic and moral necessity. A free Iran would mean fewer proxy wars, fewer refugees, and the collapse of Islamism, which is one of the most violent ideological engines of human history. And time will remember who stood with the Iranian people when they revealed, at immense personal cost, both the true nature of Islamism and the possibility of defeating it.

  • The genocide slur

    John Spencer in Tablet on the Gaza genocide charge:

    Wanting to destroy your enemy is not genocide. It is war. War is not illegal, and in some cases, it is necessary. The aim of many of those accusing Israel of genocide is in fact to make it impossible for any law-abiding nation to defend itself against those who openly proclaim their desire to destroy us, and imagine that our adherence to law and to norms of conflict will assist them in achieving their aims….

    The sad truth is that there is no meaningful comparison to Gaza. Israel is not fighting a counterinsurgency shaped over two decades with control of terrain and population. It is not a conflict in which civilians had viable options to flee to neighboring states. It does not involve the obliteration of a city by a wonder weapon. It’s a war fought in a sealed enclave where one side spent more than 20 years preparing the battlefield, constructing hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath homes, hospitals, schools, and streets, and where civilians have not been permitted safe passage through borders such as Egypt. It is also a war being fought in the age of instantaneous global communication, when algorithms on platforms like TikTok, X, and others push the most horrific images of war to billions of people in real time….

    When civilian suffering becomes the decisive weapon, advantage flows to those who want civilians to suffer. If accusation and optics define legality, the optimal strategy is to embed among civilians, prevent evacuation, fight from protected sites, and manipulate information so that every death becomes ammunition. That is not the protection of civilians. It is the exploitation of them.

    Worth reading in full.

    It’s inevitable, really. Once the term “genocide” is introduced, and understood as the worst kind of crime that can be committed, then every propagandist will seize on it to throw at their enemies. And of course there’s always that special thrill of turning it against the Jews, whose suffering inspired the term in the first place with the Holocaust – the worst genocide of them all.

  • A cemetery in which the hopes of our youth are buried

    Watch these powerful and urgent remarks — and a devastating story shared by Dr. Payam Akhavan, former UN legal advisor on war crimes tribunals, former Special Advisor on Genocide to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and one of the world’s leading international human rights lawyers — speaking at the @UN_HRC. His words are a searing indictment of the violence facing Iranians today — and a warning the world cannot afford to ignore.

  • And in Germany

    Not sure about “pure wickedness”. Pure stupidity, more like.

    This now seems to be the default position for the hard left. Whatever is opposed to the West is to be supported. Communism didn’t work out? OK. let’s try hard-line Islam.

  • Unless you’re a woman

    Another social media win. The comments on this – on Unison’s betrayal of women – are devastating.

  • A funeral for Iranians

    Mainstream media not so much. The BBC can barely stifle a yawn.

    Not all bad then, social media….

  • A “risk to the public”

    The case of nurse Jennifer Melle still astonishes. A nurse threatened and racially abused by a convicted trans paedophile because she wasn’t willing to call him a woman – and the authorities and the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) saw her as the problem. She’s interviewed in the Times.

    The nadir came when the NMC sent her a letter saying it was looking into concerns about her fitness to practice. The letter said the NMC was investigating whether she was a “risk to the public” on the basis of a “failure to treat people in your care with dignity” by referring to a patient “in a manner inconsistent with their gender identity”.

    One to file alongside Isla Bryson and the rest when the institutions that supported this nonsense are confronted with their stupidity and cowardice in support of the trans cult.

  • A powerful cabal of Asian men

    What went wrong in Birmingham? Fiona Hamilton in the Times talks to Shabina Bano, a Muslim woman who was approached by Labour’s Birmingham power brokers to run for the city council. Initially excited and honoured, she soon saw what was really going on:

    Bano now believes that, as a British Muslim of Pakistani-Kashmiri heritage, she was picked as someone leaders including Waseem Zaffar, a councillor and a prominent figure in the Asian community, thought they could control. When she did not toe the line, she said — including by refusing to vote Zaffar in as council leader — she was ostracised and bullied by his supporters.

    “This was not ordinary political disagreement,” she said. “It was a deliberate and targeted campaign, rooted in misogyny and hostility towards a woman who chose to speak out.”…

    After she was approached to run for the council in 2022 in Small Heath, a deprived inner city area with a majority Muslim population, Bano’s excitement quickly turned into concern. Male activists did not want her campaigning alone and, she says, told her husband that she was “speaking to men. You don’t know what they’re doing to her. Do you trust her?”

    She said: “They wanted to control me from the start. I was speaking to the women [on doorsteps], not the men. What normally happens is the men make the decision. They didn’t like that.”…

    Bano, 47, a mother of five, says that after she was elected she was visited by local Labour activists and told that, as a Muslim, she was expected to vote for Zaffar in a leadership contest against the incumbent, Ian Ward.

    One local figure allegedly told her “you’re going to vote with us, the Pakistanis and Muslims”, and another supporter is said to have urged her to think of a future in which she could take the MP Liam Byrne’s seat. She alleged that that supporter gave her “the sense that we need a Muslim takeover” and directly told her “we need to smash glass ceilings”….

    She was targeted by a “powerful cabal” of Asian men, she says, who were not challenged thanks to the local “biradari”, mostly male networks that operate in the British Kashmiri-Pakistani community. According to Bano, these networks means that family and friendship, rather than the quality of candidates, are behind political selections.

    A grim read. This is precisely the kind of tribal politics that campaigners against cousin marriage, for instance, have been warning about….

  • Fairy pronouns

    From the Telegraph:

    The Green Party is being sued by a former member who was suspended for mocking “fairy” pronouns.

    Emma Bateman, who was co-chairman of Green Party Women, was found to have breached diversity rules by making “clearly antagonistic” comments about “fae/faer” pronouns used by people who believe they are mythical beings.

    She was also condemned for using the terms “pronoun police” and “cognitive cis-connance” during a speech in Hyde Park, leading to a three-month suspension and disqualification from the women’s committee for nine months.

    Ms Bateman, 58, is suing the party for discrimination under the Equality Act 2010 after being repeatedly suspended and eventually expelled for her gender-critical views.

    She claimed to have been labelled an “anti-Semitic, eugenicist, fascist, far-Right bigot” and warned the party’s “dogmatic” support for trans rights threatened to ruin its reputation for “following the science” on climate change.

    Well yes. It’s no news that the Greens have completely lost the plot, but still….“fae/faer” pronouns used by people who believe they are mythical beings. Really?