Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

recent posts

email me

  • At the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art

    A report on Tehran’s hidden art collection, from the Times of Israel:

    This time last year, art enthusiasts in Tehran were celebrating an extraordinary event. A masterpiece by Pablo Picasso, “The Painter and His Model,” went on display in the city for only the second time in decades. It was shown at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, in an exhibition entitled “Picasso in Tehran” — a rare highlighting of a different face of Iran, with similarly rare approval from the Islamic regime.

    The 1927 painting was described by Bloomberg last week as “arguably the most important canvas in the world that cannot be visited or seen.” The work that helped inspire Picasso’s “Guernica,” which showcases the destruction caused by the Spanish Civil War, it sits in what Bloomberg called “one of the world’s most dangerous cities.”….

    Like dozens of other masterpieces in the museum, “The Painter and His Model” has spent virtually all of the 47 years since the Islamic Revolution shut away in TMOCA’s vaults, considered too inappropriate by the ayatollahs for display.

    The museum’s core collection was assembled in the 1970s by Queen Farah Pahlavi, wife of then-shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

    Deeply passionate about art, the queen took advantage of the soaring prices of oil to bring to Tehran some of the best modern and contemporary art, acquiring works by Picasso, Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Vincent Van Gogh and dozens more, including Jewish and Israeli artists such as Marc Chagall and Yaacov Agam, and gay ones like Francis Bacon. In 2018, the value of the collection was estimated at $3 billion.

    Amazing.

    A couple of images..

    Iranian culture Minister Ali Jannati (R) looks at US artist Jackson Pollock’s “Mural on Indian Red Ground” (1950) during the opening ceremony of an exhibition of modern art at Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art, on November 20, 2015. (ATTA KENARE / AFP)

    In the basement vault of Teheran’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini oversees a vast collection of stored Western works. Here it is juxtaposed against two works by the British artist Francis Bacon, which have not been exhibited in Iran since the Islamic revolution of 1979. (ATTA KENARE / AFP)

    A shame it wasn’t one of Francis Bacon’s popes – he was obsessed with Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Pope vs Ayatollah across the corridor.

    I wonder if AI would be up to that – an Ayatollah portrait in the style of Francis Bacon….

  • A more radical Iran

    Firstly, we don’t actually know what ideological posture the regime will develop post-war, and noone knows anything about the new Supreme Leader Mojtaba, because he still hasn’t been seen or heard since his elevation. Secondly, is it even possible to be even more radical than Khamenei version 1? This is a guy who was developing an illicit nuclear program, funding terrorism throughout the Middle East, bore ultimate responsibility for numerous atrocities including October 7 and the massacre of 30,000 Iranian protesters just this year, conducted pogroms against the Baha’i religious minority, presided over the second highest rate of executions anywhere in the world… I could go on. Everything justified and explained away by recourse to radical ideology.
    Whatever iteration we get next might be a different kind of regime, perhaps with greater input from IRGC than clerical elites. However, Im not sure its even possible for it to become more radical than it already is.

    Well…that’s the line being pushed in Tehran. See this MEMRI TV clip, for instance, where Tehran mayor Alireza Zakani claims that post-war Iran “will reach such an exalted peak that it will prepare humanity for the coming of the Mahdi”. “Inshallah” – god willing – responds the show’s host. “This will definitely happen”.

  • Girlguiding and the Observer

    Phoebe Davis in the Observer yesterday wrote about the Girlguiding trans ban, pulling the heartstrings with the story of a boy who, well…..here:

    The parents of a six-year-old trans girl who tried to cut off her penis with plastic scissors after being told she couldn’t join Rainbows, the youngest Girlguiding group, have called the decision to ban trans girls “incredibly upsetting”.

    Emily, which is not her real name, first asked about going to Rainbows in November 2025 as her friends were already members. She went to a taster session after her parents were told by the charity their daughter “would be treated like any other” child.

    Of course Emily isn’t “her real name”. He’s a boy – a boy whose parents are gaslighting the poor child.

    A response.

    But because you chose to include the case of a six-year-old little boy who reportedly tried to cut off his own penis – after being told he couldn’t be part of Rainbows (the section of Girlguiding for 5–7 year olds). Presenting it as evidence of a problem with Girlguiding’s admissions policy.

    It is not.

    It is a deeply distressing account involving a very young child – and, on any view, a serious welfare concern. Framing it otherwise is a profound failure of editorial judgement.

    You also refer to this male child throughout using female pronouns, including the phrase “her penis”.

    I appreciate this may reflect current editorial conventions. But it sits uneasily with the basic duty of a journalist to report clearly and accurately on material facts.

    I was already aware of this case through my own reporting for the Sunday Telegraph. I made a conscious decision not to include it at this stage – both because a minor is involved and because of the ethical considerations that arise when reporting on such sensitive situations.

    Those considerations are not optional.

    You will know, as I do, that journalism is not simply about presenting competing narratives. It is about establishing facts clearly, handling vulnerable subjects with care and exercising judgement about what should – and should not – be used to advance an argument.

    I trained as a journalist in the early 2000s – a good 20 years earlier than you did – but to my knowledge nothing has changed.

    Good journalism should bring clarity. It should not muddy the facts – in order to promote an ideological position.

    In this context, that means being clear about sex – a material fact that is both legally and practically relevant.

    I appreciate you may be under pressure from colleagues or editors to frame stories in a particular way – or to use she/her pronouns, or the phrase “her penis”.

    But that doesn’t make it right…..

  • A parliament of charity sector workers

    Interesting take here.

    But the problem runs deeper than defence spending. It runs to the question of what kind of person ends up in parliament, what professional formation shapes their instincts, and whose interests they are constitutionally equipped to represent.

    Charity sector workers are trained to see the world through the lens of vulnerable groups, international obligations and institutional compassion. Political employees are trained to manage narratives and avoid uncomfortable truths. Communications and lobbying professionals are trained to advance the interests of whoever is paying them. Not one of those professional backgrounds prepares you for the question of how to defend a sovereign nation, manage a border, hold a foreign state accountable or protect a citizen from an Iranian proxy group that is firebombing Jewish ambulances on British streets.

    The parliament that responded to the Golders Green firebombing by debating the language used to describe it is a parliament staffed by people whose entire professional lives have trained them to manage perception rather than confront reality. The government that rolled out an anti-Muslim hostility definition while twenty Iranian backed terrorist plots were being planned on British streets is a government whose instinct is accommodation rather than accountability…..

  • At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

    The BBC leading the charge, of course – Israeli police block Latin Patriarch from Palm Sunday mass in Jerusalem was the original headline. Since overturned….

  • Anti-Zionism “another category of anti-Jewish hate”

    A topical debate, especially in light of that Margate exhibition which was deemed by Kent Police not to be a problem since it was pitched as anti-Zionist, despite all the familiar tropes about Jews – sorry, Zionists – eating babies.

    From Adam Louis-Klein at the Free Press (via Jerry Coyne) – yes, “anti-Zionism is just another category of anti-Jewish hate”.

    After years in which Jewish and Israeli students at University of California, Berkeley were told that their exclusion was merely the product of political disagreement, a Title VI case brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has reached a settlement. It requires the university to end student group practices that excluded “Zionists,” and finally affirms that what Jewish students experienced was, in fact, discrimination.

    The settlement forces the university to confront what it had long denied: that Jewish students’ experiences of discrimination and harassment were real. Though the problem accelerated after Hamas’s genocidal massacre on October 7, Kenneth L. Marcus—founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center, which brought the suit—accused Berkeley law students in 2022 of having“institutionalized an ancient ideology of hate, incorporating it into the legal DNA of their major identity groups.” He listed clubs as diverse as women’s groups, Asian and Pacific Islander, African American, LGBTQ, and Middle Eastern student organizations, all of which had altered their bylaws to exclude “Zionist” members and speakers.

    In Marcus’s words: “Daniel Pearl, a Zionist victim of beheading, would have been constitutionally banned during his lifetime from speaking to any of these groups. His anti-Zionist murderers would not have been.”

    Berkeley’s own law dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, wrote that he had never in his life been subject to anti-Jewish prejudice like that of the weeks following October 7. He recalled a student saying the school would feel safer if it could “get rid of the Zionists” and described being accused of participating in a “Zionist conspiracy.” Many Jewish and non-Jewish academics have been forced into silence in the wake of the anti-Zionist riots on campuses.…

    Anti-Zionism transforms the very meaning of Zionism, reconstructing “Zionism” as a form of racial supremacy rooted in Jewish chosenness. This draws on a longer anti-Judaic tradition, running from Hasan Sa’b’s propaganda text Zionism and Racism—a key entry in the Palestine Essays series edited by Fayez Sayegh, the PLO propagandist who coined the term settler colonialism, and which recast Jewish peoplehood as inherently oppressive—to the Soviet-backed “Zionism is Racism” resolution of 1975 that continues to infuse the toxic discourse around “Zionism,” despite its formal repeal in 1991.

    We need a paradigm shift: the ability to see anti-Zionism as a structured form of anti-Jewish hate, with its own tropes, its own history, and its own logic—a symbolic cosmology reshaping the very terms of the present.

    Meanwhile the Greens’ motion on “Zionism is racism” has been postponed – “disrupted by technical failures, misgendering rows, and no-confidence votes”. Oh dear.

  • In the bayou

    Louisiana’s swampland, captured by photographer Frank Relle:

    Relle’s series Until the Water explores Louisiana’s otherworldly bayous through a lens of serene reverence. He places lights beneath boughs and trunks, illuminating trees against darkening horizons to emphasize their billowing shapes amid expansive wetlands distinctive to the Gulf Coast region of North America.

    [All images © Frank Relle]

    Website here.

  • The left alliance with Islamists

    Tony Blair in the Sunday Times today – We must end left’s unholy alliance with the Islamists:

    Jewish people in the UK and in Europe are genuinely fearful. Some have already left the countries they were born and grew up in, because they know these countries are not dealing with the roots of modern antisemitism and the environment of tacit permission that stalks parts of western politics.

    So we end up in the bizarre situation that a community, relatively small in the case of Britain, which on the whole works hard, does well, and gives proportionately more philanthropically than any other, is targeted by bigotry — and in any other case would provoke not just firm action but a concerted attempt to challenge the ideology behind it.

    To state the obvious, antisemitism is not new. It rolls on through the centuries with some in each generation seemingly finding new reasons, justifications, explanations or excuses for it.

    But today it has new forms, on the right and on the left. The left-wing version is a pernicious and novel development in progressive politics: the alliance with Islamists….

    The suffering of Gaza, the death and destruction, is undeniable. You can make a legitimate criticism of Israel’s tactics in the conduct of the war. Many Jews around the world make exactly those critiques.

    But you cannot engage in such criticism legitimately if you do not also condemn the terrorism of October 7. You cannot pretend that Israel does not face a substantial terrorist threat from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime and other groups that do not recognise Israel’s right to exist.

    You cannot complain about the restrictions on goods and material going in and out of Gaza unless you also reference the reasons for the restrictions: the fear in Israel that such materials will be used for the purpose of building a terrorist infrastructure, which is precisely what nearly 300 miles of tunnels underneath Gaza represent.….

    The problem is that, under pressure from party activists and parts of the Muslim community, many progressive politicians who do sincerely reject antisemitism are not making these arguments, and failing to take head-on this literally “unholy alliance” between parts of the left and Islamists in our own societies whose ideology leads inexorably to antisemitism.

    Because failure to do so creates the climate in which, even if antisemitism is not explicitly condoned, it flourishes.

    One poll during the Gaza war showed that only 24 per cent of the British Muslim community believed that October 7 happened in the way it did. Some even believe it was all an elaborate Israeli plot. That is frankly unacceptable.

    I know some say that defending the State of Israel is not the way to defeat antisemitism. But there is more at stake than simply defending Israel. It’s about defending reason. Defending facts. Standing up to the noise and intimidation to assert the truth.

    Well said.

  • Middle class antisemitism

    Camilla Long braves Matthew Collings’ Margate antisemitism show:

    Why is this kind of thing happening in our society? In our towns, on our streets, in our cities, online? It’s not just scrotes and Palestine activists who are targeting Jews and hating on them. It’s lawyers, doctors, police, politicians and artists.

    That the middle class is gripped by antisemitism may seem silly, and it’s true Margate in particular is ridiculous — the first thing I see on coming out of the station is a man in a wig, make-up and a miniskirt. But here’s a thought. How many people have made an artist like Matthew Collings successful? He has poured out Jew hatred for years now. How many casual bystanders haven’t stood in his way?

    Most immediately there is Thanet council, which promoted his show. It’s apologised, but why the council ever felt the need to advertise a man who a) can’t draw and b) boasts about how many thousands of pictures he already sells, while comparing himself to Goya, I can’t fathom.

    What about the police? When they came down to the gallery, I’m told, they saw nothing wrong. Did they even know what they were looking for?

    Or let me put it another way. How can the police spend thousands of pounds telling us that we need to be careful about “words” but then let someone spell out 130 reasons why he thinks we should hate Jews — sorry, Zionists — in a public space? Where are the Lucy Connolly coppers now?

    And then there are the other artists: the people, ironically, with the real power. Until recently Collings was a visiting tutor for the Tracey Emin Foundation, although I note his name has gone from her site. Is this kind of thing what the artistic fraternity thinks is great art? Attacking Simon Schama and people who can’t speak out?

    You may not feel artists are important, nor even students, academics, left-wing columnists or people on television who repeatedly ask why Jews must be given special treatment (another antisemitic device). But these are the people who give the scrotes licence, who tell them it is fine — in fact, that it is their moral duty — to drag the problems of Palestine here.

    With their help, Islamic activists have shut down schools, infiltrated universities, captured unions and wholly subsumed the left, whose politicians now cannot do anything except robotically repeat, “This is wrong”, even when gazing on the charred remains of ambulances owned and run by Jews in Golders Green. To deny this now is madness.

    This isn’t to diminish the horrors of Gaza. There was terrible suffering and still is. But these people do not want to understand or even admit Jewish suffering, or the dangers and evils of Hamas. In Collings’s exhibition there are no pictures of Jewish women being raped, or tiny Jewish babies being killed, or people being maimed and starved and brutalised, even though those are things that actually happened (unlike most of what he puts in his pictures).

    As I said last week, Matthew Collings would seem to be a seriously disturbed individual. Yet here we are now, exhibiting his vile garbage in an art gallery. “Oh yes, it’s anti-Zionism, you see. Not antisemitism at all”.

    As Dave Rich noted: “These are the kind of wild antisemitic scrawls that used to only show up in hate mail incidents. Nowadays you can get an art exhibition out of it.”

  • The retarded left