Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

recent posts

email me

  • Death on the streets

    From the Daily NK:

    Two young vagrants in Samsu county, Ryanggang province, died of cold and hunger in late December, a source in the province told Daily NK recently.

    “The county officials swiftly processed the case to keep it under wraps,” the source added.

    According to the source, the two deceased vagrants were sisters whose original home was in South Pyongan province. After their parents’ deaths, the sisters struggled to make a living and eventually wandered aimlessly until they reached Samsu county, on the border with China.

    After reaching Samsu county last fall, the two sisters subsisted on the street until they succumbed to harsh winter weather just days before New Year’s.

    The Samsu county authorities dealt with the sisters’ deaths as quickly and quietly as possible to avoid unwanted attention during the “special security period” at year’s end.

    “The incident would have a direct impact on their year-end performance evaluation, so the county police made it a top priority to clear the scene immediately,” the source said.

    Under orders from the county party committee to quietly process the case as deaths of young vagrants with no connections, the Samsu county police cordoned off the scene and quickly disposed of the bodies.

    The county police reportedly warned people living nearby not to talk about what they had witnessed.

  • The bias in media coverage

    “The Gaza numbers were just as unverified, and as proven often completely fabricated, deliberately used by Hamas to fuel a global propaganda war.

    “The bias in media coverage is clear. And it’s obvious which side far too many of them are on.“

  • Walthamstow Wetlands

    This morning:

  • The rage of 47 years of Islamic oppression

    Helen Rumbelow, in the Times, interviews Masih Alinejad, Iran’s public enemy no. 1:

    The Iranian regime wants her dead. Her distinctive hair is to them both a threat and a target. Having fought so long against the forced hijab, the physical symbol of savage political oppression, she has been urged by her FBI handlers to cover her hair to avoid being identified by assassins.

    In 2021 the US Department of Justice announced they had thwarted a plot to kidnap Alinejad, removing her by boat from New York for probable execution back in Iran. The next year police arrested a man prowling near her home with an AK47 rifle and 100 rounds of ammunition. Last March two men, described as “Russian mobsters” by prosecutors, were convicted by a federal jury in New York of a “murder for hire” plot.

    But she refuses to be intimidated:

    “If I am honest with you, of course I am scared,” she says via video call. “I am scared of being shot in my head, in my chest. I’m scared of witnessing my own son being shot by the same killers. I’m scared every single night when I open the door. This is in my mind. But this is in the mind of millions of Iranians. Do they give up? No.

    “When I see that Iranians face guns and bullets every day and they overcome their fear, I say to myself, who am I to let my fear run me?”…

    She describes two brutal memories of Iran. One is when she saw a woman beaten by police, “her crime was just showing a bit of her hair”. By the time they had finished “her face was full of blood, and they had removed her entire hijab during the beating”. It was a moment of clarity. The point was not hair covering.

    The second was when, aged 19, she was arrested at home for making antigovernment pamphlets. “Watching my mother begging and crying, ‘Please don’t take my daughter away,’ grabbing my hand, trying to save me. She was helpless.”

    Ever since Alinejad has had to carry the guilt of the effect her actions have on her family, guilt weaponised by the regime. “They put my brother in prison for two years,” she says. “They brought my sister on TV to disown me publicly. They arrested 29 women of my campaign in only one day to put the guilt on my shoulders.”…

    In the West she can find the differing reactions to Palestine and Iran frustrating. She has heard, with shock, some pro-Palestinian protesters in the West shout, “I am Hamas.”

    “I want to know where are those people who were chanting ‘free Palestine’. Why don’t they chant ‘free Iran’ now? Because our story and our suffering doesn’t fit their narrative.” She is angered by apologists in the West who argue that the hijab was “a part of Iranian culture, but now they are witnessing Iranians burning hijabs in the streets”.

    “In the West the left kept quiet because for years and years they were the ones trying to use the term ‘Islamophobia’ to silence critics,” she says. “When women of Iran burn the hijab, when men burn the mosques in Tehran, it is the rage of 47 years of Islamic oppression, of Islamist terrorism, of sharia law’s violence against people. A phobia is irrational. But for us our fear is rational.”

    That kind of courage makes you embarrassed for the sad western apologists for the Iranian regime, and the Free Palestine crowd who’ve now chosen silence.

  • Everything can be different

    “And every decent person on this planet truly wants the people of Iran to finally free themselves from the current regime that has brought so much evil to Ukraine and to other countries.  

    “It is crucial that the world does not miss this moment when changes are possible. Every leader, every country, and international organizations must step in now and help the people remove those guilty of what Iran has sadly become.  

    “Everything can be different.“

  • Banning Jews

    More on that banning of the Jewish MP at a Bristol school:

    School workers who stopped a Jewish MP from addressing students also successfully lobbied their bosses to cancel a speaker from an Israeli tech firm.

    The members of the National Education Union (NEU) warned opponents “don’t mess” with them, as “we are not here to play”….

    Michaela Wilde, NEU branch secretary for the schools, led the charge to stop Egan and boasted about barring Check Point. Wilde, who is a pastoral support worker at City Academy, a sister school, said the NEU representatives in the Cabot Learning Federation (CLF) were “very proud” of no-platforming the MP.

    She added that it had followed the previous “cancelling of an Israeli arms funded speaker to the [multi-academy trust] conference, cancelled due to our collective action”.

    “Don’t mess with NEU in CLF, we are not here to play,” she warned in a message posted on Facebook.

    No, they’re here to cancel Jews.

    Most recommended comment:

    My partner and son are Jewish. We have family in Israel. This is our local secondary. All other local secondary schools are run by this Academy group. How on earth can I guarantee a robust unbiased education for my son?

    This is ridiculous. Do we even have a government at the moment?

    The tiny Jewish community are being bullied (intentionally, in an organised way) in the same way black people and asian people were in the seventies. By the left. And the government and polite society are standing by and watching. Some even cheering.

    This all happened back in September. Why are we only hearing about it now?

  • Wrong about Iran

    Daniel Finkelstein, in the Times, on Iran and the hard left:

    Five years ago, during a row about his behaviour towards Jewish students at Bristol University, hundreds of leftist academics signed an open letter in defence of Professor David Miller. Despite Miller’s capacity for glaring factual errors and unhinged interpretations, his allies described him as an “eminent scholar” and “highly regarded”, presumably by the signatories as well as himself.

    This week Miller has been busy arguing that the problem with the Islamic Republic of Iran is that it is too liberal and democratic, that it is nevertheless “the last line of defence against the destruction of civilisation by PaxJudaica” and that there should be “no leniency towards saboteurs” who he argues need to be liquidated. He calls Iranian refugees “American running dogs of the Zionist enemy”. Supportmiller.org is still available online should you wish to donate, or to add your signature to that of Noam Chomsky.

    Miller is an extremist, even within the ranks of extremists. He, for instance, describes Zarah Sultana, who recently advocated the nationalisation of all of Britain’s sweet shops, as “shilling for Mossad”, while one of the recent fruits of his eminent scholarship has been to identify the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as a “footsoldier for the Jewish empire”.

    So it would be unfair to suggest his latest pronouncements are supported by all the people who leapt to his defence in 2021. But precisely because he seems no longer to care what anyone else thinks, his frank opinion is helpful in understanding the puzzling position of the left towards Iran over the last 45 years.

    Miller’s view is that the revolutionary forces in Iran are a vital bulwark against capitalist imperialism. It is essentially the same position taken by Jeremy Corbyn towards the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Corbyn told a conference held by the Morning Star that while there were criticisms to be made of the Soviets, they were the only country protecting insurgent states from the West.

    And Corbyn has long thought that true of Iran as well. For decades Iran was one of his favourite subjects. He devoted a great deal of energy to attacking western interference and holding out a hand of friendship to the ayatollahs.

    On one extraordinary occasion in 2014, just before becoming leader of the opposition, Corbyn spoke at a meeting to “commemorate the auspicious anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran” and was introduced as a “very dear friend”. Early in his birthday speech, while the rest of us were celebrating quietly at home, he bemoaned how little the West understood the Islamic Republic’s inclusivity and tolerance.

    Once upon a time the left had good reason to battle against the depredations of a ruthless capitalist class. Friedrich Engels, for instance, saw first hand the appalling conditions, including child labour, in Manchester’s cotton mills. Meanwhile western imperialism did indeed have its wicked way with “native” societies across the world. Those days have ended – thanks in no small part to the battles fought by the left and by the unions. Not that it’s all perfect, of course, but then it never could be. But the left hasn’t changed. Rather like Stonewall – forced to regroup and invent a new cause in the form of trans rights after the gay fight had been won – the left needs to reinvent new battles and new heroes in its endless struggle to keep relevant, while failing or refusing to notice that these heroic anti-western forces, like communism, like Islamism, are far far worse than our current liberal democracies.

  • The Jewish synagogue

  • A systemic problem

    “The latest incidents that happened in Manchester. Maccabi in Birmingham. Teachers in Bristol banning a local MP and demonstrators at Notting Hill, this is no longer a symptom; it’s an outbreak.

    “This isn’t a spike. It’s a systemic problem.“

  • “The Zionist lie machine”

    One of our lovely Gaza MPs.