Mick Hartley

The former CEO of LGBT Youth Scotland, who ran one of the largest paedophile rings in the country’s history, has just been released after serving his sentence. The whole sordid tale is here at Reduxx:

A once-prominent gay rights activist who ran a youth LGBT charity in Scotland has been released from prison after serving 16 years for sexually abusing a baby. James Rennie, 54, was imprisoned for his role in one of Scotland’s largest pedophile rings….

As well as distributing horrific child sexual abuse material, Rennie was also found to have been sexually abusing his godson over a four-year period starting when the child was just 3 months old.

Strachan had also sexually abused an infant boy, attempting to sodomize him while being HIV positive.

During court proceedings it was also uncovered that Rennie had used the e-mail handle “kplover,” standing for “kiddie porn lover,” to communicate with a sick predator in the Netherlands who described how he would like to rape, torture, and murder a child. The trial was labeled the “worst ever” abuse case in Scotland by media.

What’s particularly astonishing is the influence LGBT Youth Scotland had and continues to have, despite this and other scandals.

But the controversies surrounding the charity have continued over the years.

In 2024, a Scottish drag queen who helped co-author an LGBT Youth Scotland guidebook was convicted of distributing child pornography that depicted infants being sexually abused….

In a Telegram chat labeled “Extra Excitement,” Easton hoarded 132 images and 1,119 videos with newborn infants and children up to age 10. Police found that Easton also had a chat log with a user claiming to be 13 years old; Easton referred to this user as “baby boy,” and sent him photos of his genitals. He also requested the user call him “daddy.”  

Following news of his arrest, journalist Marion Scott revealed that Easton had previously worked with LGBT Youth Scotland.

According to Scott, Easton co-authored the charity’s “coming out guide” for “trans young people” which was distributed to public schools across the country and is still available on the East Ayrshire Council website. The guide, which heavily promotes LGBT Youth Scotland services, “looks at the various stages of the coming out process” in a youth-accessible tone, presenting different scenarios and considerations for minors interested in changing their gender identity.

Following the disturbing revelations, the BBC’s Children in Need charity pulled its funding from LGBT Youth Scotland, citing concerns about the organization’s ongoing controversies.

According to a recent Freedom of Information request, the Scottish Government has admitted to continuing to provide LGBT Youth Scotland with funding through various programs.

This has included £290,871 through the Equality and Human Rights Fund, £55,773 through the Delivering Equally Safe Fund, and £78,750 through the Children, Young People, Families Early Intervention & Adult Learning and Empowering Communities (CYPFEI & ALEC) Fund.

We rarely hear about the Uighur persecution – cultural genocide – nowadays. China’s repression is so total that news barely ever leaks out – and it’s much easier for our brave reporters to go to Gaza, say, where they’re spoon-fed the latest “news” from Hamas, than to risk their lives evading the Chinese police in Xinjiang. And, to be fair, no one seems that interested. Certainly not other Muslims.

Anyway, here’s some news. From the AP:

It is a soulful folk song, filled with feeling and history: A love-stricken young man tells God about his hopes and dreams of happiness. Generations of Uyghurs, the Turkic ethnic minority in China’s Xinjiang region, have played it at parties and weddings.

But today, if they download it, play it or share it online, they risk ending up in prison.

“Besh pede,” a popular Uyghur folk ballad, is among dozens of Uyghur-language songs that have been deemed “problematic” by Xinjiang authorities, according to a recording of a meeting held by police and other local officials in the historic city of Kashgar last October. The recording was shared exclusively with The Associated Press by the Norway-based nonprofit Uyghur Hjelp.

During the meeting, authorities warned residents that those who listened to banned songs, stored them on devices or shared them on social media could face prison. Attendees were also instructed to avoid phrases like “As-salamu alaykum,” the greeting common among Muslims, and to replace the popular farewell phrase “Allahqa amanet,” which means “May God keep you safe,” with “May the Communist Party protect you.”

The policy has been corroborated by interviews with former Xinjiang residents, whose family members, friends and acquaintances have been detained for playing and sharing Uyghur music. AP has also obtained rare access to the court verdict of a Uyghur music producer sentenced last year to three years in prison for uploading to his cloud account songs deemed sensitive.

The renewed crackdown on cultural expression in Xinjiang, classified as an “autonomous region” but tightly controlled by the central government, suggests a continuation of the past decade’s repressive policies. They have culminated in the extrajudicial detention, between 2017 and 2019, of at least 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China such as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Huis, rights activists and foreign governments say….

After facing international backlash and sanctions over the alleged arbitrary internment of ethnic minorities, Beijing in late 2019 claimed the detention camps were closed and life had returned to normal in the region. China now aims to refashion Xinjiang into a destination for tourism.

Although many of the more glaring signs of repression such as internment camps and frequent traffic checkpoints appear to have been decommissioned, the list of banned songs indicates repression in Xinjiang continues, albeit more subtly, said Rian Thum, a senior lecturer in East Asian history at the University of Manchester.

Other, less conspicuous forms of control include the expansion of boarding schools, where middle-schoolers are educated while separated from their families and learn almost exclusively in Mandarin Chinese, and random checks of phones for sensitive material are common.

Turkey has historic and ethnic links with Xinjiang, aka East Turkistan. There’s a recent interview with an Istanbul-based Uighur activist at MEMRI TV, where he says that Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are much better treated than Uighur prisoners in China. They can even study. In China the prisoners come out in body only.

Melanie Phillips adds her bit to the El_Fattah debate:

People like Sir Keir Starmer who campaigned for Fattah’s release have fallen into the usual western trap of viewing the developing world through western eyes. Presented with someone fighting an obviously repressive and authoritarian regime, they assume he must be a pro-democracy campaigner and a heroic figure. It never occurs to them that such an activist may also harbour a violent hatred of the West and be a danger to Britain.

Now, though, the government faces a dilemma if they throw Fattah out. There are others in Britain who harbour views like his. Should they be stripped of their citizenship and thrown out too? The answer must be yes. It would be insane not to do so — even if liberals scream “police state”.

No society should be forced to tolerate the intolerable. But in thrall to the dogma of non-discrimination, Britain has lost the ability to draw the line between what should and should not be tolerated. Fattah’s tweets were not just, in his words, “shocking and hurtful”. They incited murder. Yet while people get arrested for causing offence to “protected” minorities, a blind eye is turned towards incitement against white people, Jews and Christians.

At the heart of all this lies the issue of citizenship. In recent years, it’s come to be regarded as a right. But it’s not. It’s a privilege to be earned. Citizenship is a bargain between the individual and the state. The state undertakes to deliver certain benefits to the individual such as defence, public safety and voting rights. In return, the citizen undertakes to keep the laws of the land and to do nothing to imperil it.

The state has broken that bargain by bringing into the country many who never intended to keep it. Fattah is the latest egregious example of a liberal society committing cultural suicide.

Israel seems now to be the only liberal democratic society that is clear-eyed about this – from bitter experience.

We’ve already noted Sohrab Ahmari’s view that Alaa Abd El-Fattah is “a genuinely odious character”. Here he is now at UnHerd – El-Fattah’s release exposes Starmer’s moral emptiness:

Starmer’s government made it a “top priority” to obtain El-Fattah’s transfer to Britain. The cause célèbre was also pushed by the likes of Judi Dench, Brian Cox, and Joseph Fiennes. El-Fattah had further support, it seems, from a small army of Whitehall bureaucrats, who in 2021 managed to secure a UK passport for him (on the dubious grounds that his grandmother had given birth in Britain decades earlier).

The resulting fiasco is an unanswerable indictment of the entire human-rights apparatus and worldview. Which is to say, it’s an indictment of the world that gave birth to Starmer’s career.

But El-Fattah’s history should not have come as a surprise. In the autumn of 2014, when I was working as a London-based editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, the European Parliament’s United Left-Nordic Green Left bloc nominated El-Fattah for the Sakharov Prize, named after the Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. I knew of El-Fattah by reputation, having researched the Arab dissident for an anthology I edited on the Arab Spring. El-Fattah for the Sakharov Prize? That was moral madness.

As I wrote in a Journal editorial urging reconsideration of the award, “Mr. Abdel Fattah may have been brave in confronting authoritarianism in his own country. But his rhetoric on Israel and moderate Arabs is another story. ‘One should only debate human beings,’ he tweeted in 2009. ‘Zionists and other imperialists are not human beings.’ In late 2010 he tweeted: ‘Dear zionists please don’t ever talk to me, I’m a violent person who advocated the killing of all zionists including civilians’.”

There was more, as the editorial noted: “‘My heroes have always killed colonialists’, Mr. Abdel Fattah tweeted in 2010, linking to a news article marking the death of Abu Daoud, the Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes. In 2012 he wrote: ‘Assassinating [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat isn’t something that should shame a man, but instead honor him.’”

The editorial, published in America’s largest newspaper by circulation, had the intended effect. El-Fattah’s name was withdrawn from the Sakharov list. “We get results,” one of my bosses noted in a triumphant internal email. I could scarcely imagine that, a little more than a decade later, the odious El-Fattah would be fêted by liberal elites once more, this time in Britain. And on an even grander scale that would include the right to call himself a “Briton”.

This, despite the man’s manifest hatred for his adopted land. He has repeatedly referred to the British as “dogs and monkeys”, for example, and urged Londoners to burn Downing Street. He has “joked” about taking over towns and “rap[ing] ur women” — just the sort of thing British social cohesion needs amid the backlash over migrant hotels and grooming gangs. And he’s called for killing all police, “hating white people”, and the “random shooting of white males”.

Much milder rhetoric than El-Fattah’s can get native-born Britons prosecuted and sometimes jailed by their government. That the same government would fight for El-Fattah, and even celebrate him, is intolerable. It renders the reality of two-tier treatment crystal clear.

It is now being briefed that the Prime Minister was unaware of El-Fattah’s tweets and regards them as “abhorrent”. Yet Starmer’s plea of ignorance does not exonerate him. After all, he pressed Tory governments on El-Fattah’s status while in opposition without apparently doing any digging into his background, not least the circumstances surrounding the withdrawal of the Sakharov nomination. But more than that, the El-Fattah affair is the logical terminus of the Prime Minister’s whole worldview: one in which empty proceduralism and rights talk substitute for moral and political judgement.

Starmer was obsessed by the procedural “human rights” of the case, while failing to do even the most cursory checks. It’s just about possible that he was unaware of El-Fattah’s history, but it’s surely inconceivable that no one in the Civil Service was aware. They just didn’t care.

As the British public, if not the British government, could immediately identify, one of the aggravating features of the El-Fattah affair is the cheapness with which he acquired a British passport. Fawning Left-wing coverage is more likely to note that El-Fattah delivered human rights lectures in prison than that he obtained a passport only in December 2021, via his mother. Suddenly the “dogs and monkeys” were of use to him.

Most dangerously, the willy-nilly granting of a UK passport to a hater of the West debases the whole notion of British (and Western) belonging. It confirms the worst suspicions of those who insist that the legal processes of immigration and naturalisation mean little to nothing when it comes to genuine loyalty to Britain and the West. If the Starmer government retains a scintilla of prudence, or even the most basic instinct for political self-preservation, it must revoke El-Fattah’s dubious passport and send him home. And if that results in further jail time for El-Fattah in Egypt’s brutish prison system, that should be his concern — not Starmer’s, and not the British people’s.

Ella Kenan – Qatar’s Long Game: How Influence, Ideology, and Money Shape the West:

Any serious examination of Qatar’s influence strategy must address its relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood is a transnational Islamist movement whose ultimate objective is the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate governed by Islamic law, pursued through gradual institutional penetration rather than immediate violence.

This ideology is widely considered extremist and is banned by law in several Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, which view it as a threat to state stability. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and combines this worldview with terrorism and armed violence. Qatar supports the Brotherhood for both ideological and pragmatic reasons, using its networks to project influence far beyond its size.

When these ideas are laundered through Western media, academia, and civil society, they become harder to identify and easier to normalize. That is the real risk.….

The US are in the process of banning the Muslim Brotherhood. I linked to this MEMRI report a couple of days back, in which Arab writers urge Europe to follow the US example.

A companion piece, as it were, to that previous post. Adam-Louis Klein:

The Western and academic left has fundamentally failed to understand the Middle East—not just politically, but cosmologically. It approaches the region through a narrow, narcissistic lens of anti-colonialism, in which only those voices that oppose “the West” in the correct idiom are granted legitimacy. In this schema, Arab nationalist and Islamist narratives are elevated as the sole authentic expressions of regional resistance, while the vast plurality of Middle Eastern peoples—especially non-Arab, non-Muslim, and heterodox groups—are erased, ignored, or pathologized. The region’s deep civilizational and religious diversity is flattened into a symbolic stage upon which the Western left performs its own rituals of self-absolution.

This is not pluralism. It is a narcissism of anti-colonialism, a moral performance that reflects Western guilt back onto itself while using the Middle East as a mirror. And in this mirror, only one figure can be seen clearly: the anti-Western, Arab-Muslim actor. All others—Kurds, Jews, Christians, Copts, Yazidis, Armenians, Assyrians, Maronites, Zoroastrians, and others—are dismissed as Western proxies, “collaborators,” or imperial residue. Their struggles are not treated as decolonial, but as betrayals. Their voices are rendered foreign. This logic reproduces the very dynamic of exclusion that Arab nationalist and Islamist hegemonies have long imposed on minorities, now legitimized by the Western academy under the banner of postcolonial solidarity….

In short, the left’s vision of the Middle East is not anti-colonial—it is colonial in a new key. It replaces the real plurality of the region with a convenient morality play. It denies the legitimacy of non-Arab and non-Muslim Peoplehood. It enforces an epistemic dhimmitude not only on Middle Eastern minorities, but increasingly on itself. And in doing so, it ensures that no true solidarity can emerge—only the repetition of erasure, in a different voice.

Avi Avidan on The Dawn of Minority Liberation: Israel’s Role in Shattering Sykes-Picot.

The artificial borders of the Middle East, drawn a century ago by British and French diplomats in the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement, have long suppressed the region’s diverse peoples Kurds, Druze, Maronites, Alawites, Baloch, and others trapping them in states dominated by Arab majoritarian rule. These lines ignored ethnic, religious, and cultural realities, breeding endless conflict and oppression.

Today, those borders are cracking. In Syria’s Suweida province, the Druze minority has risen in defiance, demanding self-determination amid clashes and calls for protection some even waving Israeli flags as a symbol of hope.

Across the Horn of Africa, Somaliland’s long quest for independence achieved a historic breakthrough when Israel became the first nation to grant full recognition on December 26, 2025, forging diplomatic ties in the spirit of regional realignment.

Israel stands alone as the power capable and willing to redraw the map.

Unlike distant empires or hesitant superpowers, Israel acts decisively to secure its borders and support allied minorities. From buffer zones in Syria and Lebanon to strategic partnerships, it enforces a new order where threatened communities Maronites in Lebanon, Kurds across borders, Alawites, Baloch separatists, and even the remnant Christians of North Cyprus can aspire to autonomy or alliance.

This is the era of minorities seizing their freedom. With Israel’s unwavering backing, the oppressive legacy of Sykes-Picot crumbles. The future belongs not to imposed unity, but to self-determined peoples allied with strength. The cracks in Suweida and Somaliland are just the beginning the old order dissolves, and a bolder, freer Middle East emerges.

What is 'Palestinianism'?

"Palestinianism has absorbed into it just the worst of the Arab and Muslim world, the worst of the Western and Eastern Soviet world. And it all comes together in one place around the destruction of Jewish sovereignty," explains Dr Einat Wilf… pic.twitter.com/fKEa5QaStJ

— AIJAC (@AIJAC_Update) December 29, 2025

Full conversation here.

Green MP Sian Berry picks a side.

Two days ago, Laila Soueif, mother of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, shared a Facebook post claiming that the hostages “were not subjected to systematic torture”.

My cousin Tsachi was taken hostage alive after watching his firstborn daughter murdered in front of him. In captivity he was… https://t.co/uTTlOAU3Hz

— Adam Ma’anit 🎗️ (@adammaanit) December 28, 2025

Full text:

My cousin Tsachi was taken hostage alive after watching his firstborn daughter murdered in front of him. In captivity he was denied medical care, denied visits from the Red Cross, starved, tortured, and ultimately murdered. His body was returned to us so mutilated that forensics had trouble identifying him.

My MP @sianberry never once contacted my family when Tsachi’s remains were finally returned earlier this year. No condolence. No acknowledgement. Just silence.

Yet she is content to stand smiling beside the mother of an extremist who now shares posts denying the torture and mistreatment of the hostages – lies contradicted by the detailed, harrowing testimony of survivors who lived through those abuses and the forensic evidence of those who were murdered.

Soueif’s son called for the killing of Zionists. He called for the expulsion of Jews from Israel. He praised Yahya Sinwar and other terrorists released in the Gilad Shalit deal as “heroes.”

As her constituent, and as someone whose family has paid in blood, the contrast is devastating – silence for the murdered, smiles for those who excuse their tormentors.

This sums it all up really – the extraordinary adulation of a vicious antisemite and his mother, while the suffering of Jews is of absolutely no interest or concern.

Have any of the luvvies who’ve been signing letters in support of El_Fattah and reading out his words in tones of reverence – the new Nelson Mandela! – shown any signs of regret? None that I’ve seen.

Gritty northern France, that is: none of your fancy Brigitte Bardot/St Tropez stuff.

Photographer John Bulmer, at Cafe Royal Books:

_{[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/John Bulmer]}