Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Iran at Davos

    Added:

  • Defending cousin marriages

    From the Telegraph:

    The NHS has defended cousin marriage because most do not lead to birth defects, it has emerged.

    Midwives have been told about the benefits of “close relative marriage” in training documents that minimise the risks to couples’ children.

    The documents claim “85 to 90 per cent of cousin couples do not have affected children” and warn staff that “close relative marriage is often stigmatised in England”, adding claims that “the associated genetic risks have been exaggerated”.

    Some 15% of cousin couples have children with genetic defects (the national average is 2%), but it’s not a problem? The appeasement of regressive cultural mores is so deeply ingrained in our institutions that even birth defects aren’t a problem if its their culture.

    Marriage between cousins is most common in Pakistani communities in Britain, and has led to fears around the greater risk of genetic conditions in their offspring and oppression of women.…

    The NHS guidance, meanwhile, goes on to describe the benefits of cousin marriages.

    The papers explain how “marriage within the family can provide financial and social security at the individual, family and wider kinship levels”.

    They add that “any discussion of the potential risks” to a child’s health “must also be balanced against the potential benefits” that come from “collective social capital” of such a union.

    From the Times:

    Richard Holden, a Conservative MP who is campaigning to ban cousin marriage, said: “I just find this unbelievable. It is really concerning to me. There are no benefits to marriage between first cousins, only massive downsides for health, welfare, individual rights and the cohesiveness of our society.”

    Michael Muthukrishna, professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics, said: “When marriage is restricted to family members, communities become more isolated, limiting social integration.

    “This isolation is what has allowed for over-representation of radicalisation and grooming gangs. Normalising cousin marriage doesn’t help mothers, nor babies affected by the well-documented health risks of repeated inbreeding.”

    The reason cousin marriages were banned across Scandinavia was largely because of the coercion:

    The Swedish minister of justice, Gunnar Strömmer, correctly argues that a ban could help combat marriages entered into under pressure or coercion. Cousin marriages are frequently arranged or forced. In some cases, refusing to go through with the marriage can result in violence or even so-called honour killings. By banning cousin marriages, the Swedish government aims to break the cycle of coercion and control rooted in these practices.

    And:

    Pakistan is the country with the highest rate of consanguineous marriages, and the practice has come over here with immigration. A 2005 report, commissioned by MP Ann Cryer, revealed that the Pakistani community accounted for 30 per cent of all births with recessive disorders, despite representing 3.4 per cent of the birth rate nationwide. From that same period Dr Peter Corry, Consultant Paediatrician at Bradford Royal Infirmary, said his hospital saw so many recessive genetic illnesses that it had became a centre of excellence for the treatment of some of them. They’d identified about 140 different autosomal recessive disorders among local children: he estimated that a typical district would see 20 to 30.

    See also, Matthew Syed.

  • Getting the message through

    They’re playing videos and messages of solidarity from the outside world. They’re showing our protests, the support from elected officials, the encouragement from the Crown Prince, and the international community.

    On the screen, the messages tell them to keep going, to keep fighting, that we are with them, and that freedom is the closest it’s ever been.

    This is like a movie. They tried to isolate them from the outside world but the light just keeps breaking through the dark. They cannot break our connection.

  • March for Iran

    Added:

  • Buddying up

    A parable for our times, from the Mail:

    Stek Oost, located in the Watergraafsmeer district of Amsterdam, was sold to the Netherlands as the dream solution to the housing and refugee crisis.

    A total of 125 students and 125 refugees would live alongside each other, and were even encouraged to ‘buddy up’ so the migrants would adapt to life in the Netherlands more quickly.

    But students living there told Dutch investigative documentary programme Zembla they faced multiple sexual assaults, harassment, violence, stalking and even claimed a gang rape had taken place.

    One woman said she would regularly see ‘fights in the hallway and then again in the shared living room’.

    A man told the programme that a refugee threatened him with an eight-inch kitchen knife.

    And they claimed they were ignored despite filing multiple reports to authorities.

    In one shocking case, a former resident said that a Syrian raped her after inviting her to his room to watch a film then refusing to let her leave.

    The woman, identified only as Amanda, said: ‘He wanted to learn Dutch, to get an education. I wanted to help him.’

    Amanda described how he asked her several times to come to his room. She eventually relented and agreed to watch a film with him.

    However, he soon made her uncomfortable and she asked to leave, only for him to trap her in his room and sexually abuse her.

    Despite her filing a police report following the incident in 2019, police dropped the case due to a lack of evidence.

    Ah well. What is it they say? You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

  • Les Nouveaux Antisémites

    Nora Bussigny in the Times of Israel:

    If antisemitism has long plagued France, dating back to the Middle Ages, it’s now metastasizing in new, alarming ways, according to a recently published book by French journalist Nora Bussigny.

    Titled “Les Nouveaux Antisémites” (“The New Antisemites”), it exposes virulent Jew-hatred endemic to many far-left organizations in France, infiltrated by Bussigny as part of a lengthy undercover investigation. Using a false identity, Bussigny uncovered pervasive antisemitism and anti-Zionism, now a common denominator among diverse groups that often disagree on other matters.

    “I saw with my own eyes to what degree Islamists, far-left so-called ‘progressive’ militants and feminist, LGBT and ecological activists are closely linked in their shared hatred of Jews and Israel,” Bussigny told The Times of Israel during a recent interview on Zoom.

    It was, she reports, a considerable challenge to act the part.

    “At first, I went too quickly,” said Bussigny, whose mother is from Morocco, her father from France. “Participating in demonstrations, I made mistakes. For example, I’d say ‘Israel,’ which militants never say except for insults. They usually say ‘the Zionist entity,’ or if writing, they call it ‘Israhell.’ They also never say the IDF, but rather ‘the genocidal army.’ There were terms I had to learn to have the ‘right’ vocabulary.”

    Bussigny also needed her best performance skills.

    “Initially, some of the people looked at me with mistrust,” she added. “I had to really concentrate on how I spoke and acted when I was among them. They watch you to see if you’re chanting, if you’re happy to be there, if you’re filming. They’re suspicious. I made sure to look cheerful and excited to chant with everyone the glory of Hamas and Operation Al-Aqsa Flood [the terror group’s name for the October 7 atrocities]. I was so careful to play the part that it became almost schizophrenic for me.

    It’d be nice to think we’re better here in the UK, but I doubt we can realistically make that claim.

  • Marking Holocaust Memorial Day

    Very depressing. From the Times – Number of schools marking Holocaust has halved since Oct 7.

    More than 2,000 secondary schools around the UK had signed up to events commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day in 2023, which takes place on January 27, according to data from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Until that year, those taking part had increased annually since 2019.

    But since the terrorist attacks by Hamas, the number of participating schools fell to fewer than 1,200 in 2024 and 854 in 2025 — a reduction of nearly 60 per cent.

    You’d think that the October 7th Hamas pogrom would reinforce our shared commitment to remember where antisemitism can lead – but it’s gone the other way. Perhaps we never really meant it.

    Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis:

    Over the years I have spent a great deal of time talking to Holocaust survivors. All of them are remarkable in their own way but invariably, in the end, they all make the same desperate appeal to me: “Please don’t let the world forget.” Whenever they have done so, I have confidently looked them in the eye and promised that we never would. Now I am forced to ask myself whether that confidence was misplaced.

    Honouring Jewish victims of genocide does not diminish compassion for any other people. On the contrary, it enlarges it, because collective memory is not a finite resource. The lesson of the Holocaust is not that Jewish suffering matters more but that Jewish suffering matters at all. And that when Jews are dehumanised and attacked, it is a sign that our entire society is experiencing a fundamental moral malaise.

    My father fought in WW2. I remember him saying how in the future people just wouldn’t believe what happened in the Holocaust. They just wouldn’t believe how such a monstrous thing could happen. Well, we’re getting there.

  • The Iran massacre

    Hen Massig:

    Iranians are calling the regime’s massacre a ‘genocide.’ They are already talking about the day the regime will fall and promising ‘Nuremberg-style trials’ for those who have spilled the blood of their children.

    For three weeks, we watched history repeating itself.

    Religious and ethnic minorities, who have already faced the brunt of the regime’s cruelty, are facing it even more harshly now. Just today, reports came out that Iran has arrested many in the Bahai community, Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious group.

    Regime propaganda machines are insisting the Bahai are closely linked with Israel and are responsible for the “riots.” How many more, besides the 800 already marked, will be executed in the coming days?

    When all is said and done, experts may indeed look back at this time and label it a genocide by the regime. At the very least, this heartless bloodshed is an offense to humanity itself.

    So it is no wonder that Iranians feel so betrayed right now. They, with everything to lose, were promised help and walked out to the streets of Iran to face bullets with no defense. US President Donald Trump promised them that there would be action. “Help is on the way,” he said, which spurred even more Iranians to the frontlines. After so long, reinforcements were coming.

    But they haven’t come.

    Iranians are fighting with nothing but their own bodies, taking bullets in the name of the freedom we all know they deserve.

    But where is Trump? Where is Netanyahu? Where is anyone who can do anything to help them?

    Iranians are saying this is an even greater betrayal than Obama’s in 2009.

    I don’t know what’s worse: to promise to help and do nothing, or to insist that diplomacy with this brutal, deceiving, and fanatic regime is the only way, and then doing nothing.

    I baulk at this use of “genocide” for any mass killing, but if the Bahai are being targeted then, yes, it’s justified. Otherwise, massacre. That’s what this is. A massacre of the innocent.

    It’s typical of Trump. The two major issues he has to deal with, Russia and Iran, he just talks big and does nothing – the reverse of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Speak softly and carry a big stick”. Where he does act is where it’s easy: removing Venezuela’s Maduro just to replace him with Maduro’s deputy, and Greenland, for god’s sake.

  • Unison and the Darlington nurses

    “UNISON has a membership that is around 75% female, yet its response to a legal ruling about women being unlawfully required to share changing rooms with a male colleague leads not with women’s rights – but with trans rights.

    “What exactly is being defended here? The right of trans people to fair treatment at work – which no one disputes? Or the right of males to access women’s changing rooms – even when women object and the tribunal has now ruled that forcing this is unlawful?

    “A trade union’s first duty is to protect its members’ legal rights at work. Female members might reasonably ask: who is UNISON actually standing up for?“

    It’s standing up for the men in dresses.

    New hard-left Unison leader Andrea Egan has suggested that banning trans women (men in dresses) from women-only spaces was like banning women with blue eyes or women with blond hair.

    To be a trade union leader nowadays, with only activists bothering to vote in leadership elections and turnout often below 10% – Egan was elected with 7% – you just have to mouth the latest left shibboleths and you’re in. No thought required. She’s also a big fan of “Your Party”.

  • West Midlands Police “institutionally anti-Semitic”

    No surprises here. From the Telegraph:

    West Midlands Police is “institutionally anti-Semitic” and has repeatedly dismissed alleged hate crimes against Jews in Birmingham, a whistleblower has claimed.

    A dossier obtained by The Telegraph, including internal emails and police crime logs, appears to show West Midlands Police disregard complaints about alleged anti-Semitism and extremism raised by members of the Jewish community, including by a former police volunteer who claims she was dismissed by the force after raising concerns.

    In one case the force is accused of failing to act after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was punched in the face and kicked in the stomach by a classmate shouting “free Palestine”, leaving her in need of medical attention.

    Its Prevent unit, designed to intervene early in cases of possible radicalisation especially in younger people, is also facing criticism after appearing to ignore multiple reports of extremism and anti-Jewish hatred.

    Emails seen by The Telegraph show the unit saying there was “no role” for police to respond to a WhatsApp group chat in which a student said he wished Hitler had done more to kill “the little rats [Jews]”.

    The unit also appeared to dismiss a report of extremist material on display at a pro-Palestine march which proclaimed that “the military action of the Palestinian resistance on October 7 was justified”, an apparent endorsement of Hamas terrorism.

    To be fair every major city in the UK has seen similar, especially here in London, with the Hamas supporters of the Islamist-left alliance marching en masse weekend after weekend with their “Globalise the intifada” and “From the river to the sea”, while the police stand by. But yes, Birmingham does seem to be leading the way.