Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • A rebrand of “anti-Muslim hostility”

    Shadow equalities minister Claire Coutinho, in the Times, on Labour’s proposed Islamophobia ban:

    Has the government learnt nothing? It is set to announce its new definition of Islamophobia under a rebrand of “anti-Muslim hostility”. The definition apparently seeks to stop the “prejudicial stereotyping and racialisation” of Muslims or the “creation of practices and biases” that disadvantage Muslims within our institutions.

    These woolly terms will give those who wish to shut down legitimate criticism of Islam the means to do so, whilst missing the bigger problem.

    Sara Sharif might be alive today if the authorities hadn’t been too scared of being branded racist to ask why an eight-year-old child had suddenly started wearing a religious head covering. She had been forced to wear it by her father who wanted to hide his abuse behind her hijab. He went on to murder her.

    Councils and police forces failed to protect vulnerable girls from rape and abuse by predominantly Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs, again, because of fears of being called racist. The security guard who had a “bad feeling” about the Manchester Arena bomber didn’t approach him because he, too, was scared of appearing prejudiced.

    We have created an environment in which our public services worry more about the reputational damage of causing low-level offence than they do about preventing serious harm. The public are rightly horrified by these failures and undoubtedly the war in Gaza has further exposed divisions here at home. However, it is grossly naive to believe that creating a separate tier of protections for one religious group is going to lead this country to greater unity.

    Do you know what would reduce prejudice and resentment ? No more Jews being slaughtered in synagogues. No more protests blocking our streets calling to “globalise the intifada”. No more turning a blind eye to the rape of young women and girls.

    There’s a strong sense here of Labour playing to the Muslim vote. Calculated political cynicism in the guise of progressive enlightenment – it’s all too familiar with this government.

    In the pursuit of this definition, Labour — with one eye on the electoral threat from sectarianism — may commit the greatest harm to moderate Muslims by upending one of our deepest British values: that we are all held equal before the law.

    Why single out one group for protection – one religion – when we already have laws against spreading hatred? And particularly now, when Islamic-inspired ideologies are behind the appalling rise in antisemitism. There’s never a good time for this, but now is certainly not a good time.

  • Stopping the Jew-hate

  • The BMA man

    He’s a Corbynista, and a gender activist, pushing the BMA into its rejection of the Cass Review

    For two decades Dolphin has been a key figure agitating for strikes by the BMA and fighting for higher pay and pensions. He was a Labour Party activist and member under Jeremy Corbyn and is part of a small group accused of “ideologically capturing” the doctors’ union over puberty blockers and transgender care.

    So here we are.

  • Boats and birds and trees

    Finsbury Park this morning.

  • The making of eunuchs

    The subject of female genital mutilation (previous post) has grim parallels with a subject that is now, hopefully, in the past: that is, the forced castration of male African slaves, as routinely practiced by Arab slave traders. Eunuchs were less troublesome than fully intact males, and could be trusted to look after the extensive harems of the sultans.

    Like most people, perhaps, I hadn’t given too much thought to the process itself, assuming it to be unpleasant but not too traumatic.

    Turns out I was wrong. In Justin Marozzi’s Captives and Companions – a history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world – he goes into some detail as to what actually happens, after warning sensitive readers to skip ahead.

    Just the removal of the testicles? Not so. Or not usually. Removal of penis and testicles was common. The young boys would be chained down and their genitals would be removed “with one sweep of a sharp razor”. The pain was so intense it could never be forgotten. And that was just the beginning of the ordeal. A short bamboo catheter had to be placed in the urinary tract to keep it open, and then the child had to be immobilised by being buried up to the neck in warm sand to allow the wound to heal. Mortality rates were estimated by some to be as high as 90%, though a later estimate suggested it was more like 60%.

    If the boy survived, he would be plagued by urinary tract infections for the rest of his life, as well as incontinence, osteoporosis, and chronic pain. But, well….someone had to look after those harems….

  • Fashionable academics

    Jo Bartosch on those academics in the Journal of Medical Ethics:

    Academics from some of Britain’s most prestigious institutions have crossed a moral boundary that would make even the edgelords lurking in the darkest recesses of the internet blanch. A group of 25 scholars, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Bristol, and Brighton and Sussex Medical School, have published a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics which appears to recast female genital mutilation not as abuse but rather as a misunderstood cultural practice in need of gentler language….

    We are invited to believe that the real scandal is not what is done to girls’ bodies, but in fact the bad manners of Western activists, journalists and policymakers who insist on calling it mutilation. Laws designed to protect children are said to undermine the “privacy, autonomy and self-determination of individuals, families and communities”. To labour the point, the authors draw an equivalence between FGM in Africa and the Western fashion for cosmetic labiaplasty. Both practices are undeniably shaped by sexist myths about what female bodies are supposed to look like. Only one, however, is imposed on girls who have no capacity to refuse.

    And, more often than not, without anaesthetics.

    Once you accept the premise that cultural meaning can redeem any practice, FGM becomes just one entry in a catalogue of global female suffering that we are apparently no longer permitted to judge, lest we be accused of racism or, in the authors’ words, aligning with “neocolonial development frameworks”. Yet a defining characteristic of racism is precisely this refusal to apply moral norms equally: treating some people as so culturally delicate, or morally other, that basic standards of bodily integrity and child protection are said not to apply to them. Such dangerous cultural relativism ensures that Western girls are safeguarded, while non-Western girls are “contextualised”.…

    The fashionable position among certain academics is that moral judgement itself is the real violence. Harm lies not in what is done to girls’ bodies, but in how loudly outsiders object to it. Thanks to them today, the knife is no longer only in the cutters’ hands, but in the footnotes, carving away the idea that some things are wrong everywhere, always, and especially when done to children.

    What strange and alarming subcultures have developed in our universities, such that academics now argue how mutilation of young girls can be excused in the name of opposing racist stereotypes, while slapping themselves on the back for being progressive.

  • Part of global jihad

  • The guardrails against antisemitism have been dismantled

    Melanie Phillips in the Times:

    So the West’s embrace of the Palestinian cause means the guardrails against antisemitism have been dismantled. Posing as the championing of an oppressed people, Palestinianism has made such discourse respectable in western society. Well-meaning people have no idea that this is what they are supporting. And they don’t realise that the street demonstrations aren’t just a protest. They’re also a delirious expression of the Islamists’ belief that the October 7 onslaught, and the West’s subsequent support of the anti-Israel narrative, signify that they’re on their way to defeating the Jews and conquering the West. This is demonstrated by their command of the streets and the authorities’ toleration of their incitement.

    Many Muslims in Britain, Australia and elsewhere in the West have no truck with extremism. The hero of Bondi beach, who tackled one of the gunmen and disarmed him with his bare hands, is a Muslim of Syrian origin. But it’s very wrong to deny that most terrorism is Islamist and that antisemitism is a major problem in the Muslim world.

    In Australia an Islamic scholar, Wissam “Abu Ousayd” Haddad, preached in November 2023 that the Jews were “rats” and “cowards” who controlled the media and the banks and who needed war to continue in order to make money. And he specifically denied that he was talking about Zionists. Let the West condemn Zionists, he chuckled. He was talking about Jews. Islamic preachers similarly incite against Jews in Britain. As in Australia, no action is taken against them.

    As a result of its sensitivity to any criticism of the Muslim world as “Islamophobic”, the West is missing the crucial fact that for Islamists the destruction of the Jews is a necessary step towards the destruction of the Christian West. From the early 20th century Islamic theorist Sayyid Qutb, who inspired modern political Islam, to Osama bin Laden and the Hamas charter, Islamic jihadis have said their war is against modernity which is a bacillus carried by the West; and behind both modernity and the West are the Jews.

    The laundering of antisemitism as opposition to Israel means that the West can’t see it is the frog in the pot, slowly being boiled.

    The take-over of our streets by the Islamist-hard-left alliance may have started out as a sign of our tolerance for diversity of opinion and public protests – a proud British tradition – but it’s now reached the point where the authorities actually seem frightened to do anything. Witness West Midlands Police and their easy capitulation to the hard-liners in banning Maccabi Tel Aviv fans – clearly frightened of a confrontation. The Islamists and leftists now parade at every opportunity, chanting their Jew-hate – “globalise the Intifada” – quite openly.

    Many, particularly on the left, have been fooled into thinking that this this is a “traditional” battle of an oppressed people under imperialist rule. But in truth this is all about Islam.

  • Going to court

    The fight for Hampstead women’s pond takes a new turn:

    Allowing males who identify as female to swim in a women-only pool and undress in front of biological women is unlawful, a campaign group suing a local authority has claimed.

    Sex Matters, a charity that campaigns for single-sex rights, will argue that the City of London Corporation is breaching equality law by allowing trans women to use Kenwood Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath.

    They will submit their claims to the High Court on Wednesday in a hearing that will decide whether to grant permission for the case to be heard in full.

    There are three ponds on the Heath – men’s, mixed, and women’s. At the moment men can use all three, while women – with the greater need for privacy – have nothing for themselves. But the absurd City of London have been insisting that trans women are women, and aren’t about to change unless pressured.

    A spokesperson for the City of London Corporation said: “We recognise the sensitivity and complexity of this issue and await the outcome of the permission hearing.

    “Like many organisations, we are reviewing our access rules to ensure they remain fair, lawful and respectful in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling and evolving Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance. Our recent public consultation will inform this review, with feedback now being independently analysed and will be published in due course.

    “Our priority is to provide a safe and respectful environment for all users.”

    Obviously not. Not for women. And this self-justificatory waffle about the “complexity” of the issue….there’s nothing complex about it. It’s absolutely simple and straightforward. Keep man out of women-only spaces. That’s it.

  • Holocaust guilt