Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • The pro-Hamas lemmings

    Seth Mandel at Commentary:

    It’s not enough to be horrified by Hamas. Any healthy society must also be horrified by anyone who shared Hamas propaganda throughout the war.

    The legions of pro-Hamas lemmings marching throughout American and European cities have tricked us into lowering the civilizational bar. We tend to be sated with scraps—just denouncing Hamas has become some kind of achievement. But the scale of Hamas’s depravity should leave its useful idiots tortured by their own conscience as well.

    For instance, the fate of Noa Marciano – killed at Shifa hospital by an injection of air into her veins, as her father now knows after he was sent the video.

    Noa Marciano was taken alive from Nahal Oz on October 7, along with six other female soldiers. Hamas blamed her death on an Israeli airstrike, and media were happy to repeat the claim. Hamas filmed Marciano in a hostage video pleading with Israel to stop the airstrikes, then filmed Marciano’s dead body.

    What had actually happened, however, was that Hamas brought Marciano to Shifa Hospital alive and then executed her there in cold blood. Shifa was one of the hospitals that Israel said were being used by Hamas, sometimes to hold hostages, while the media pooh-poohed the claims. This is why “according to the Gaza Health Ministry” is insufficient, even if it’s followed by “… which is controlled by Hamas.” Once you know a claim or statement comes from Hamas, you cannot play the he-said-she-said game, as if dueling Israeli and Hamas claims have equal weight. Reciting Hamas talking points isn’t “reporting.”

    Which is what the BBC does. Headline news, every time.. And when it’s shown to be false, as with the Al Ahli hospital bombing, Jeremy Bowen says he “doesn’t regret anything” about reporting the Hamas lie.

    That is especially true on subjects such as how a hostage died in Hamas captivity. The lie that IDF strikes killed the Bibas children persisted until the truth came to light: Palestinian terrorists brutally murdered the children with their own hands, then mutilated their bodies to hide the evidence.

    The lie about the Bibas children still persists – with a British MP, no less. From the JC:

    An MP elected on a pro-Gaza platform has “hit a new low in an already appalling pattern of hostility” toward Israel for falsely claiming the country was responsible for the deaths of the Bibas family….

    On Monday, Iqbal Mohamed, who was elected as an Independent MP for Dewsbury and Batley last July, shared a post from another user on social media that claimed the family were killed by “Israeli bombs”, accompanied by an image of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir….

    The MP added his own caption: “Lies. Damn lies. And Israel! There is no limit to Israeli lies, inhumanity, depravity and attrocities (sic)”….

    Labour MP David Taylor added that he was “shocked and disgusted that Iqbal Mohamed appears to be spreading conspiracy theories about a family tragically abducted by sick terrorists. He is not fit to be in the House of Commons.”

    He continued: “I thought appearing to advocate against a ban on first-cousin marriage was the lowest Iqbal Mohamad MP could go. But clearly not.

    Back to Seth Mandel:

    Then there was this week’s revelation that Hamas hoarded baby formula. Israel’s claims that it was letting in plenty of aid? True. Accusations that Israel was starving Palestinian babies? False. But it does seem pretty clear that Hamas was trying to cause the death of innocent babies just so it could blame it on Israel.

    No one should be surprised by this. But the libel that the Jews were deliberately murdering children had its intended effect: Jews all over the world were violently attacked, Western countries pulled support for the war effort to displace Hamas, European outrage torpedoed a cease-fire deal, and Palestinian anti-Hamas activists were demonized.

    “When countless other Palestinian activists and I from Gaza said this back in July, August, and September, we were villainized, attacked, threatened, and made into pariahs by the ‘pro-Palestine’ industrial complex and activist mafias, even though for Gazans, the evidence was so clearly apparent before our eyes,” wrote Gaza native and Atlantic Council fellow Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.

    “Never allow yourself to be a useful idiot in Hamas’s propaganda,” Alkhatib added. “You can have compassion for the real suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, and demand Israeli action to facilitate aid entry into the coastal enclave, while still holding Hamas accountable for its part in causing a hunger and starvation crisis in the first place.”

    Forget “compassion.” There’s no avoiding the grim reality that “the real suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza” was the goal of Hamas and its Western loyalists all along.

  • All on Cass

    The government are putting this all onto Baroness Cass – we’re just doing what she said.

    I wonder how Cass feels about that. She could speak up, even at this late stage. In fact she’s perhaps the only person now that can stop this whole disgraceful business, apart from Wes Streeting. But will she? Her proud legacy has been the banning of puberty blockers. That – and Streeting’s legacy too of course – would be seriously tainted if she now acquiesced to this.

  • “False and non-existent quotes”

    It’s the story that keeps on giving. The Sandie Peggie tribunal judgement, that is.

    A landmark legal ruling on trans rights has been thrown into doubt after it emerged that a judge used “false and non-existent quotes” to support his findings.

    It’s not just the Maya Forstater case “made-up” quote. The whole thing is riddled with errors.

    The certificate of correction aimed to draw a line under the matter but The Times has established that Kemp’s ruling contained a second bogus citation, prompting calls for an investigation into how this could have happened in such a high-profile case.

    It is not clear whether this was a case of human error or if AI had “hallucinated” false data which appeared in the ruling after going unchecked.

    Dr Michael Foran, an associate professor of law at the University of Oxford, claimed the errors were clear and significant. “It is an incontrovertible fact that the judgment includes supposed quotes from specific judgments that do not appear in those judgments,” he said. “That in itself is extraordinary. How this happened and what consequences will flow from it are unclear at this point, but there are incredibly serious questions that need to be answered.”

    He added: “It is not clear to me that the tribunal even has the power to reissue the judgment with these quotations removed. The power that permits reissuing judgments is confined to correcting clerical errors and accidental slips or omissions, not substantial changes of this magnitude.”

    Peter Daly, a lawyer who specialises in employment law, said the blunders would undermine confidence in the legal system. “The common law system relies on the principle that judgments contain reliable reports of the authorities on which they rely,” he said.

    “The suggestion that non-existent quotes from case law have been used in any court judgment is therefore of the utmost seriousness because it is potentially a threat to the functioning of our legal system. It is important that the suggestion that it has happened in the Peggie judgment is publicly acknowledged, investigated and resolved without any delay, in order to maintain public trust in the law.”

    Perhaps that horse has already bolted – in Scotland, at any rate..

    One senior legal figure claimed the failures would almost certainly lead to the judgment being withdrawn entirely or overturned on appeal.

    “Serious questions must be asked as to how this was allowed to happen,” they said. “For the biggest case held in the Scottish courts this year to be undermined in such a serious way is nothing short of jaw-dropping. People will now have to go through every other case that Kemp has dealt with and cross-check all the references.”

    They claimed suggestions that AI had been used in the production of the ruling must be assessed. “Perhaps the most charitable explanation is that the judge has used AI and it has hallucinated, citing non-existent quotes from previous rulings,” they said. “But whatever has gone wrong, this is extremely serious and completely unprecedented. Judge Kemp must immediately refer himself to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office.”

    To a non-legal expert like me, it looks very much like judge Kemp had swallowed the whole trans ideology bit, and was also driven by a class view that saw Peggie as an uppity trouble-making working class woman, against the fragrant and well-spoken middle class doctor “Beth” Upton.

    Anyway Peggie has appealed. This one will run and run.

  • Politicians denying the undeniable

    “Couple that with being called a white slag and countless testimonies, reports and local inquiries all finding the same things…. its pretty hard to deny. But yet here we have it… decades later… politicians still denying the undeniable.”

    Mothin Ali is deputy leader of the Greens, and the man who who shouted Allahu akbar and described getting a seat on Leeds city council as a “win for the people of Gaza”.

  • Removing a bogus quote

    Well now…

    The judgment in the Sandie Peggie NHS Fife trans row employment tribunal has been amended to remove a bogus quote.

    The original 300-page document referenced a line supposedly from a major gender campaigner’s separate tribunal from 2021.

    It related to the case brought by gender campaigner Maya Forstater – a supporter of Ms Peggie – against the Centre for Global Development Europe.

    But Ms Forstater told us: “I know that judgment inside out, and I thought [after reading the NHS Fife judgment], those words are not there.”

    And on Thursday afternoon, Judge Sandy Kemp admitted the blunder less than two hours after The Courier published a story bringing the issue to light.

    The Judicial Office branded it a “clerical mistake, error or omission”, with the spurious section now replaced by a new paragraph from the Forstater judgment.

    Ms Forstater – the chief executive of Sex Matters, the gender-critical charity backing Ms Peggie – said: “I knew this was wrong, and it’s good it’s being amended, but I am astonished that it happened and I would like an explanation of how it happened.”

    The whole thing is an embarrassing shambles.

    This judgment was already being questioned because it seems to fly in the face of the Supreme Court’s clear statement that single-sex facilities can only be on the basis of sex, not claimed identity. Errors like this just add to the growing feeling that this is not a sound judgment.

    Back to the drawing board.

    Added:

  • From anorexia to the gender cult

    A grim tale, which shows how irresponsible gender cultists, like GenderGP’s Helen Webberley, can ruin the lives of vulnerable children:

    The father of a child who was prescribed a potentially fatal dose of testosterone by the online clinic GenderGP has described his anger at hearing the clinic’s founder deny knowledge of the case.

    Family court documents show that GenderGP prescribed a 15-year-old such a high dose of testosterone that she was at risk of sudden death. Asked about the case by Jo Coburn on Times Radio, GenderGP’s founder, Helen Webberley, said: “I don’t know this case and it’s not my patient.”

    John has never spoken publicly before now. His name has been changed to ensure his daughter cannot be identified.

    He describes how — in his view — his ex-wife weaponised gender medicine to cut him out of his daughter’s life, how his daughter went from being sectioned for anorexia to being affirmed in her trans identity by all the adults in her life except him, how she was given a prescription for testosterone after one online session with a counsellor, and how this was injected by her local NHS GP with no blood tests or clinical evaluation.

    An independent expert, the endocrinologist Dr Jacqueline Hewitt, told the court that the teenager — known as J in the documents — was “at risk of sudden death” because of the thickening of the blood caused by testosterone.

    She said that in 20 years she had never before seen such a massive dose of testosterone administered to a young person. John points out that the risks were exacerbated by a family history of heart disease.

    All around John’s kitchen there are pictures of a little girl, grinning at her father at different ages. “We got on like two peas in a pod,” he says. “Behind every one of those pictures of her smiling and laughing, that’s me joking around. That’s gone.”

    He has lost contact with his daughter — he does not even know what she got in her GCSEs — and now that she is 18, he no longer gets court-ordered medical updates. In the final one he learnt that she was booked in for surgery imminently.

    J was diagnosed with autism aged 13. At 14 she was sectioned because she had become severely malnourished. John suggested the patients on the anorexia ward should not be allowed phones but was told by a psychiatrist that it was their human right.

    “One of the main reasons they’re in there is because they picked up all this stuff on social media,” he says.

    He describes how the young people there would order weights to sew into their clothes. They would also link up online with “ana-buddies” who would give them targets. If, for example, they failed to avoid eating for three days, they would be given a forfeit.…

    Before she was sectioned, J had told her parents that she was a lesbian, and then she and her best friend said that they were in fact boys in a gay relationship. “These are two autistic girls who were ostracised in school,” says John. After J came out of hospital, she ate nothing for a week. Then her mother made a deal with her: if you start eating, I will let you take the gender drugs.

    “That was it,” John says, “Full fat, Big Macs, you name it, she was eating it.” He was told about the plan after the appointment had been booked.

    “I was foolishly under the belief that being under 16, she couldn’t access this stuff. There’d be due process.” Within three months she was having her first deep muscular injection from her NHS GP, after GenderGP issued a prescription.

    John went to court to try to stop it. In May last year, the court issued a warning about GenderGP. The judge ruled that as there were no suitable NHS services for J, she should be assessed by another private clinic, Gender Plus. John went along with this reluctantly on legal advice.

    He wanted to establish a principle that where parents disagree on an issue of such magnitude, both would have a say. “In all of this, I’m up against my ex-wife,” he says. “She absolutely hates me.”

    Now he drives over with birthday presents but is not allowed in. He remembers the last time he saw her, after she had started taking testosterone. Looking at his photographs, he remembers dropping her home: “When she said goodbye, her smile was the same girly shy smile she had as a little girl. Somewhere in there is my daughter.”

    From the nightmare of anorexia to the nightmare of the gender cult. Without knowing the details, it’s possible perhaps to sympathise with the mother: getting her daughter away from anorexia by the promise of agreeing to the gender drug treatment. But where were the responsible professionals in all this – the medics?

  • Harming vulnerable children

  • Bum wiping

    Janice Turner on Jack Polanski’s latest:

    For a tribune of the left, Zack Polanski is an astounding elitist. On BBC Question Time the Green Party leader said high immigration was essential because “I don’t know about you but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum”. The scoffing condescension. Me? Wipe a bum? The very thought! So of course a privileged, private school-educated man such as Zack needs to import an infinite Untouchable caste.

    Beyond the insult to people entering Britain with higher skills than failed actor and boob hypnotist Polanski, it was a crass reduction of care work to bed pans. The magnificent Yorkshire women who tended my bed-bound mother for four years said wiping up bodily fluids didn’t bother them: the hardest part of their job was maintaining a calm, cheerful demeanour for the frightened, querulous old people in their care. These “bum wipers” were also trained in complex medical procedures and end-of-life care.

    But for Polanski bum wiping is intrinsically low-grade and therefore beneath him. He reminds me of those fathers who “don’t do nappies” and hand a whiffy baby back to its mum. Because, the world over, bum wiping is mainly women’s work: repetitive, dirty, thankless, only noticed when it is not done. Which is why it is unforgivably low-paid, and will remain so as long as liberal globalists like Polanski demand lives of frictionless convenience at a bargain bin rate.

  • Under the influence of fear and corruption

    A powerful piece from Juliet Samuel, in the Times, on the Maccabi Tel Aviv debacle:

    What’s odd is that the “evidence” compiled by West Midlands police, which was used to justify making the city an official no-go zone for Israelis, bears so little resemblance to the official Dutch account. It has more in common with the story told by local Islamists. As the Dutch police told The Sunday Times, the British force’s account was simply “not true”.

    To explain this discrepancy, MPs summoned the cops, O’Hara and his boss, Craig Guildford, the chief constable. Guildford, a man whose explanatory powers are best understood by imagining that Chief Wiggum was made to undergo some sort of “executive stakeholder management training”, was keen to stress that because he had admitted that at least one factual claim was “completely wrong” (due, incredibly, to being “scraped off social media”) MPs could be very confident that he hadn’t made up the rest.

    Unfortunately, shortly after making this dubious case, he and his colleague admitted that their figure for the number of police deployed in Amsterdam, a number they had cited as fact, was in fact made up. Then O’Hara claimed that the decision to ban Israeli fans had been supported by Birmingham’s Jewish community. The next day, he retracted that claim.

    Still, they argued, you couldn’t fault them because their process had been “peer-reviewed” by fellow chief constables who make up a body called the UK Football Policing Unit. This is the same unit that they also stated had been intimately involved in gathering the evidence, suggesting a degree of incestuousness not normally associated with the term “peer review”. Asked to explain why the Dutch police had debunked their “evidence”, they suggested that this was all to do with political pressure in the Netherlands and that they knew the real truth because the Dutch had told them on a Zoom call, which unfortunately no one took any minutes of.

    As for the government, it was performing its usual trick of waiting until there was failure and then condemning it. The Home Office was naturally aware of the likely impending screw-up but, as the minister Sarah Jones explained: “We did not have a function in that process”. A functionary with no function: that aptly summarises the government.

    The implications of this lamentable farce are profound. The authorities are running scared.

    This isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern. If you want to know how the grooming gangs could get away with it, how they still are, why the issue of Palestine was allowed to take over so many city centres for so long, why we see parades of masked Islamist men praying in the road in Whitechapel or groups being permitted to chant about Gaza outside suburban Tube stations in Jewish London, the answer is the same. All too many arms of the British state operate under the influence of fear and corruption, beholden to local interest groups who use intimidation to take over the public square.

  • A near-masterpiece of fat-headed special-pleading

    Finally, on the Sandie Peggie tribunal judgement, Alex Massie in the Times:

    The long-awaited judgment in the employment tribunal brought by Sandie Peggie against NHS Fife and Dr Beth Upton is a near-masterpiece of fat-headed and meretricious special-pleading. Although it found that NHS Fife had indeed harassed Peggie by allowing a male doctor to use a changing room reserved for women, it dismissed most other claims on the basis that it would, apparently, be unkind to allow them to stand.

    Upton, the trans-identifying doctor in question, is by law and biological reality a man. Despite this handicap, Upton identifies and dresses as a woman. This deeply impressed Alexander Kemp, the judge presiding over the employment tribunal. According to Kemp, the doctor has “changed essentially all the non-physiological attributes of sex”. He wears lipstick, he has long hair and he has adopted “a pitch and tone of voice consistent with that for a female” and if that don’t make him a woman, what could?

    He’s a man. That’s all that matters in this case. However fragrant and dolled-up and nicely spoken, he’s still a man.

    Throughout the judgment there is a pungent whiff of class condescension. Upton is Officer Class and Peggie is very much Other Ranks. Places, quite literally, should be known — though this applies to some people more than to others.

    Other aspects of the judgment are almost heroically mistaken. At one point Kemp writes that there is no evidence trans women — biological and legal males — pose greater risks to women within a single-sex space than other women. This thoroughly misunderstands the objection. Being trans is not the issue; being male is and there is no way to differentiate between a trans-identifying male and any other male in this regard. The wearing of lipstick, you know, is not dispositive. Similarly, comparing Upton to Isla Bryson does not suggest the doctor is a rapist; it merely posits that, like Bryson, he’s a man in a space hitherto reserved for women.

    Moreover, some things truly are binary. A single-sex space, where reasonable, ceases to be single-sex if people of the other sex are admitted to it. This is not difficult to understand and we should expect even lowly employment judges to be capable of grasping the point.

    The law is all-seeing even if homo sapiens is not. Yet according to the tribunal, Upton’s presence in the female changing rooms only became problematic once someone complained about it. This appears a novel variation upon an age-old philosophical inquiry: if a tree falls in the forest and no one complains, has it really fallen? Actually, yes it has and silence in this instance ought not to be confused with consent. The best that can be said of this obviously appealable judgment is that it is legally incoherent.

    It is probably much worse than that, too. For much of this judgment cannot be trusted. Credit should be apportioned to Stuart Campbell, proprietor of the Wings Over Scotland website, for identifying that several of the citations used to support the judgment’s conclusions are at best wildly misleading and, in some cases, possibly entirely fake..

    The misquoting, and the trans activist language – “assigned at birth” and so on – all serves to further muddy the water. As the Labour government has been doing ever since the clear Supreme Court ruling.

    The Equality Network, Scotland’s government-funded LGBT charity, now declares that Kemp’s ruling overrides the Supreme Court’s findings. This is a novel theory of jurisprudence. But it also demonstrates that the confusion evident here is partly the consequence of ministerial foot-dragging. The British government and the Scottish government have both promised to uphold the Supreme Court’s ruling in theory while in practice doing very little of the sort. This prevarication, rooted in cowardice and a fear of upsetting favoured constituencies, should shame both governments.