Mick Hartley

Camilla Long in today’s Sunday Times on that report – Hamas’s sexual terrorism is laid bare and still the world looks away:

To read any one of the 298 pages of the Civil Commission’s report, published last week, on the rapes carried out by Hamas on October 7 is to be plunged back into hell. There is not only the graphic horror of it — the maimings, the torture, the shocking sexual violence — but the knowledge that, in the days, months and years after it happened, many people pretended it hadn’t.

There were no outcries, no populist movements. Few feminists spoke about what had happened to Jewish women, even though sexual terrorism was, as the report now shows, central to Hamas’s plan.

UN Women waited months to concede, in a tweet, there may have been some “gender-based violence”. In this country feminists warned against being “Islamophobic” and “racist”. In 2024 the Jewish-American writer Phyllis Chesler was amazed to note a “shameful, even unbearable, silence” among her feminist colleagues, while watching feminists, lesbians, queers and gays flocking to the streets and “marching for Hamas”.

Reading the report now, I share her horror: how was this even possible?

Because Jews. But also because Palestine and Hamas have been set up as the great progressive cause of the moment, and such brutality can be hard to justify – though, god knows, many tried. Also, because it’s almost impossible to believe that anyone could behave with such mindless sadistic violence – though, tragically, history gives us enough examples.

In every paragraph there are descriptions of women being stripped, raped and then killed. Sometimes, after they are killed, they are raped again.

They are mutilated: one witness at the Nova music festival said she saw Hamas fighters cut off a woman’s breast while they molested her. They threw it in the dirt and then played with it. She was then shot in the head while still being gang-raped.

Kibbutz Be’eri, three miles from the border, was found littered with dead women, often tied up, often naked. One victim had “knives, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers, tools, tools from the household” embedded in her body. “The body was completely mutilated.” Then there were the women who lay dead, blood surrounding their genitals. At a military base female soldiers were “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina”. And when all that was over, and these criminals still hadn’t had enough, they would destroy the women’s faces.

Yes, they hate Jews. They really really hate Jews. It’s what they’re taught, from infancy – mostly, disgracefully, in UNRWA schools. Also, I think, we need to remember that these young men were fired up, not only by Jew hatred, but also by drugs – captagon, most likely, the nasty amphetamine-style drug that bank-rolled Assad’s Syria, and possibly cocaine too. This isn’t normal human behaviour.

Bestselling authors Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock have afaik never been invited to the @hayfestival, but every year the ‘we have no idea what a woman is’ crowd is everywhere. Luxury beliefs fit with the demographic I suppose.‘Woodstock of the mind’, my arse. pic.twitter.com/rowyJZ7hPB

— Ursula Doyle (@suladoyle) May 15, 2026

Julia Gillard is of course making the news now for her role in setting the scene for the current Giggle v Tickle debacle, thanks to her government’s amendments to Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act in 2013, which stripped explicit biological definitions of “man” and “woman” from the legislation and replaced them with protections based on gender identity. I wonder if Katya Adler will be asking her about that.

Narrative violation warning:

Elders in my Arab village in Israel told me the richest Palestinians sold their land and left first. 80 years later, their grandkids now claim to be displaced victims.

I am so allergic to victim mindset. It boils my blood. ~15 million displaced… https://t.co/3CfJsAk6kg

— Nuseir Yassin (@nasdaily) May 16, 2026

~15 million displaced Hindus and Muslims in India-Pakistan around the SAME year. No one is trying to be a victim there. It’s time to move on.

“You only get to be a victim once. After that, you’re a volunteer.”

As an offshoot of Rob Burley’s report on the BBC’s trans obsession, here’s the Telegraph – BBC News boss: I was driven out by trans activism:

A former BBC News boss has claimed she was driven out of the top job by trans activists.

Fran Unsworth, the director of BBC News from 2018 to 2022, said she had been bullied out of the role by gender ideologues employed by the corporation.

Speaking for the first time since leaving the BBC, Ms Unsworth said: “I would actually say it drove me out, just dealing with the progressive editorial issues and the bullying around them all. It was incredibly difficult.”

In an interview with her former colleague Rob Burley, published by UnHerd, Ms Unsworth said BBC News had become “increasingly unmanageable” during her tenure….

Ms Unsworth suggested that programme editors had avoided critical reporting on trans issues for fear of being attacked by their own colleagues. 

She claimed that news reporters came under an “awful lot of pressure” from “other parts of the BBC if they felt that the editorial direction of the story was not supporting their particular point of view on it”.

She said “maintaining impartiality became quite difficult” for the news division, given pressure from BBC staff in drama and entertainment to adopt what she described as a “mono perspective” on trans issues.

However, problems with the BBC’s coverage of trans issues continued after Ms Unsworth’s departure.

Last year, The Telegraph published a leaked memo from Michael Prescott, the corporation’s editorial standards adviser, in which he claimed its trans coverage had been subject to “effective censorship” by specialist LGBT reporters.

Now, as Matt Brittin, the former Google executive, prepares to take up the post of director general next week, Ms Unsworth has sought to explain her own record on the issue.

She said the BBC’s problems at the time had reflected the “progressive madness” engulfing other institutions.

“This wasn’t something that just affected the BBC,” she said. “The world went mad, and the BBC, because it is part of the world, went a bit mad with it. This was going on in every institution in society; there was a kind of national bullying going on.”

A reasonable point perhaps, but no organisation should have been more clear about the need for impartiality than the BBC, given their importance within the UK’s media landscape, and their tax-funded status. But they failed, miserably.

So what are the prospective new Labour leader’s political views?

A longtime supporter of trans rights, Burnham criticised last year’s Supreme Court ruling that defined “sex” in the Equality Act as biological sex.

He has argued it makes daily life and access to public facilities more “confusing” for transgender people. He has advocated for a new consensus rather than strict legal exclusion.

I’m no fan of Reform and Nigel Farage, but for once I hope they win in Makerfield. The whole thing’s a ridiculous carve-up. Better Starmer stays than Andy Burnham gets in.

Rob Burley, a former senior BBC editor, writes at UnHerd on the BBC’s capture by trans ideology:

It allowed its pursuit of younger audiences and an obsession with Diversity & Inclusion to skew its editorial judgement and marginalise women. This investigation exposes the extent of that capture. Based on my own experiences at the BBC, and numerous conversations over many months with members of staff, past and present, it reveals the scale of the problem and the difficult task ahead.

Assessing the damage, one former senior BBC executive who worked closely with Davie is particularly damning. ​“I’ve never been an enemy of Tim’s,” he tells me, “but I think that shows, again, his inability to understand what journalism does. He’s not a journalist. And that’s the problem.” One senior presenter despairs for an organisation out of touch with its licence-fee payers: “We seem obsessed with drag queens. We are in a terrible mess at the BBC.” Another wants drastic action: “There’s no sign of anyone getting a grip on anything,” he tells me. “The only solution is getting rid of them all. It’s like cutting out cancer. You have to just do it.”

Stonewall, as ever, was at the centre of things.

It was the BBC’s job to resist being carried along on a wave of activism and concentrate on impartiality but too many of its staff, including its executives, were pre-disposed to view the transactivist position as inherently progressive and therefore good. By absorbing the transactivist world view, the new Style Guide seriously compromised the BBC’s ability to be impartial when the controversy around the issue exploded a few years later. But that wasn’t the only problem.

In 2015, having delivered marriage equality for gays and lesbians, the hugely successful lobby group Stonewall decided to focus its energies on transgender rights. This was a perfectly legitimate move — although an ultimately disastrous one — which became a big problem for the BBC. At the time that Stonewall made this fateful decision, the Corporation was already a paying member of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme which offered advice, “inclusion strategies” and a nice logo to advertise your commitment to diversity. It was also registered with Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index. The more the BBC reflected Stonewall’s approach in its internal policies, the higher it scored on the Index, and it was keen to do well as the nascent diversity and equality movement took hold within the management. So, when Stonewall added the letter “T” to the “LGB”, giving fresh impetus and credibility to the transgender rights agenda, the BBC found itself aligned with one side of the argument.

This seamlessly embedded the politics of transgender self-ID into the BBC’s HR and corporate policy, just as the Style Guide had embedded it into its journalism. The BBC, we should note, wasn’t an outlier. This was happening everywhere. And there was no resistance. As Gavin Allen, a senior manager and member of the BBC News Board from 2014 to 2021, remembers it, people were blinded by the power of the Stonewall brand. “Stonewall was a credible organisation,” he tells me. “If they said ‘X, Y, Z,’ we thought, ‘Oh, Stonewall, oh God, maybe they’re right, and we’re on the wrong side of history.’ Then you realise, ‘Wait a minute. This is horseshit.’ But unfortunately, that was way too late.”

“I heard that phrase, the ‘wrong side of history’, in so many bloody meetings,” remembers one very senior executive I spoke to. Meanwhile, women were speaking up but being ignored. The BBC seemed to work on the basis that if it was OK with Stonewall, then there was no need to check.

Yes, very much on the wrong side of history, as it turns out.

Much of the blame for all this, I think, goes back to the Birt revolution in the 90s, which believed that the old-fashioned way of presenting the facts of the news needed to be enhanced by analysis. The traditional journalistic “who, what, where, when, how” framework represented, they argued, a “bias against understanding”, and the most important question, for Birt and his followers, and the one that should be answered first, was “why.” So the BBC would not only report the news: they woud explain it for us. And since the BBC was then and still is largely staffed by progressives straight out of Oxbridge, the results were inevitable.

[And not only in the case of trans ideology, but Israel and Palestine too. So, for instance, Jeremy Bowen can report on the supposed Israeli strike on the Al-Ahsi hospital, killing hundreds, but when the truth emerges – that it was a mis-fired Islamic Jihad rocket that hit the hospital car park – he says he has no regrets about his initial report. Because the facts are of less importance than the underlying deeper “truth” that the BBC needs to impart to us: that the Israelis are murdering bastards and the Palestinians are the poor victims of this brutal aggression.]

From the Times – Mother sues all-girls school for ‘admitting transgender pupil’.

She’s suing not because the pupil in question is trans, but because he’s a boy. In an all-girls school. A girl who was trans clearly wouldn’t be a problem.

Joanne Donoghue loved the all-girls secondary school in East Yorkshire she attended as a child, so much so that she sent her three daughters there too.

Now, thirty years on from her own school days, she is seeking to sue over a claim that the once proudly female-only Beverley High School had “secretly” admitted a male pupil.

Donoghue decided to bring legal action after a year-long battle to obtain answers from the school and East Riding of Yorkshire council, which oversees admissions, about how the boy who identified as female was allowed entry.

Donoghue, 46, who is a teacher herself and taught at her alma mater for a time, described the decision to sue the institution that had been such an “important part” of her life as “horrible”. But she insisted she had no choice after her inquiries about the admission of trans pupils were repeatedly “shut down”.

This month, she instructed lawyers to send a pre-action letter threatening to lodge a High Court claim for a judicial review against the local authority.

Good for her.

The background to her action is the landmark judgment by the Supreme Court in April last year. It ruled that the term “sex” under the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex and not an “acquired gender”, with far-reaching consequences across the public sector.

Well yes.

From Yuki Zeman at Quillette – Nicholas Kristof and the Pornography of Accusation:

Since 7 October, the distribution of belief has been one of the most revealing features of public discourse. The sexual atrocities committed by Gazans on that terrible day have been carefully documented using autopsy information, forensic evidence, the testimony of survivors and first responders, and the perpetrators’ own recordings and confessions. Despite the wealth of accumulated evidence, many anti-Israel activists and international officials still responded with suspicion, denial, euphemism, and demands for unchallengeable proof. Activists insisted on incontrovertible evidence, they warned of propaganda, they spoke about the importance of context, they carefully parsed testimony, and they treated Israeli suffering as a field of possible manipulation. The dead were cross-examined before their blood was dry.

However, the most tawdry and dubious accusations against Israel are now being received by those same activists with a striking generosity, despite their reliance on anonymous witnesses, politically interested intermediaries, and organisations embedded in an anti-Israel advocacy ecosystem. Anonymity has become understandable, inconsistency has become evidence of trauma, political contamination has become social context, and advocacy reports have become documentation. Those who treated Israeli testimony as suspect now treat accusations against Israel as morally self-authenticating. This is how the politics of defilement works. And in a hierarchy of credulity, Israeli victims must pass through a tribunal of suspicion while accusations against Israel, no matter how far-fetched or poorly supported, enter the public imagination half-canonised.

And let’s not forget Francesca Albanese.

Kristof’s column depends on this kind of drift from caveat to heinous accusation. Individual accounts become a pattern; the pattern becomes a structure; the structure becomes a national indictment. By the end of the essay, readers are no longer asked to consider whether or not instances of abuse have occurred in Israeli detention facilities, they are invited to condemn Israel tout court. The Times transforms unresolved, poorly corroborated, and politically mediated claims into a totalising moral portrait of a nation.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, exemplifies this posture. Repeatedly criticised for casting doubt on evidence of Hamas’s sexual violence while treating accusations against Israel as proof of guilt, Albanese belongs to a wider class of international functionaries who speak the language of law while they direct suspicion in one direction only. The Albanese method, as it now appears in practice, is simple: disbelieve and seek to discredit every instance in which the Jew is a victim; believe and promote every instance that makes the Jew look obscene. The formulation is harsh because the double-standard is not simply a matter of tone; it is one of the routes by which antisemitism enters respectable discourse in humanitarian drag.

Zeman also reminds us of the 2007 effort by an anti-Zionist scholar by the name of Tal Nitzan to probe the use of rape by the Israelis against Palestinian prisoners. She could find no instances, however, so bravely concluded that this was because the Israelis were simply too racist to rape Palestinian women: “The lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences — just as organized military rape would have done.” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

This was not an official report. It was an academic attempt to explain why Israeli wartime rape is statistically rare compared to other theatres of conflict. And even here, the evidence was twisted to indict Israeli dehumanisation of Arabs. Today, Kristof and others perform the opposite manoeuvre. Israel is guilty not because its soldiers do not rape Palestinians, but because accusations of sexual abuse ratify a verdict that has already been decided. The conclusion is stable. Only the argument changes. Evidence is simply the surrounding scenery.

It's so obvious this man is a bully. It's like a sexist schoolboy prank / seventies comedian riff on "wanting some of those wimmin's rights" but women aren't even permitted what was once the "privilege" of just ignoring him https://t.co/BHZ0PztuPT

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) May 15, 2026

In fact, the appeal judge went further than the original ruling – finding direct rather than indirect discrimination and ordering Sall Grover to pay $20,000 in damages (double the original amount), plus costs of up to $100,000 (to cover both the main and cross-appeals).

On the basis that Grover excluded Tickle from the Giggle app. And then refused to re-admit him on the basis of ‘her gender-related appearance’.

Now Grover is off to the High Court. To defend herself against claims of ‘sex discrimination’ – against an individual who anyone can clearly see, on sight, is male.

Insanity.

Israel has trained sea otters to pinch Palestinian bottoms and say “Cheer up, love, it’s only a bit of fun”

— leekern (@leekern13) May 15, 2026