Ireland was able to remain neutral in WWII, but the Eurovision issue is just too big to stay on the sidelines.
— Climate Warrior🐬 #ClimateJustice🇵🇸🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 (@ClimateWarrior7) December 4, 2025
Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
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An apology at last. From the Times:
Scotland’s national library has apologised to two authors whose gender-critical book was banned from an exhibition due to demands from activist staff.
Sir Drummond Bone, chair of the National Library of Scotland, admitted the institution had been wrong to refuse to include The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, an account of the grassroots feminist campaign against Nicola Sturgeon’s self-ID law.
Drummond Bone – there’s a fine Scottish name. A John Buchan hero, perhaps…
He also apologised for the library’s “reaction” to an article in The Times breaking the news of the book’s exclusion.
Correspondence released after a freedom of information request shows taxpayer-funded library spin doctors stating they were “briefing everyone” that aspects of the story were “highly misleading”. However, the report was accurate and the book was readmitted to the Dear Library exhibition in September after the library admitted it had made the wrong decision.
An independent review into the saga also vindicated the authors, ruling that the decision to not display the book had been based on “inadequate evidence and consultation”.
That’s one way of putting it. More accurately, trans activist staff made the complaint, and Amina Shah, Scotland’s chief librarian, caved in.
Not everyone’s happy:
Despite the library reinstating the book and attempting to move on from the damaging censorship row, LGBT campaigners and academics have criticised it for reversing its initial decision. It emerged this week that dozens of academics, writers and cultural figures signed an open letter claiming that displaying the book made the national library “materially less safe” for visitors and staff and expressing “outrage” at the capitulation.
The letter states: “That book, whose contributors include several high-profile figures in Scottish politics and culture, advocates against the civil and human rights of trans people, a small and vulnerable minority who experience systemic disadvantage. This decision has led directly to a hostile environment for queer and trans people working at and visiting the library.”
Such snowflakes. A book on display stops them visiting the library?
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Full interview here.
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Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore has a new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, out next summer. He’s interviewed today by Daniel Sugarman at Jewish News. What, he’s asked, have been his impressions since 7 October 2023.
“I found massive support from all over society, both high and low… almost unanimity in sympathy for Jews and much more understanding of what’s really at stake here”, he tells me.
That lies in sharp contrast to “those in the most privileged higher echelons of media and academia, where the taboo against anti-Jewish racism has truly vanished. Many news anchors and reporters have become ideological activists who arrogantly disdain facts in place of a simplistic unrealistic Manichaean world pantomime in which Israel and Jews have dark sinister roles.”
He goes further. “This kind of darkness is really at its most intense in these news organisations and so-called humanitarian organisations, and in academia too… The bias leads them to make repeated mistakes, that they resist correcting. They only correct mistakes when forced by public outcry. But mistakes have to be called out.
“It was indulged in our civic institutions, academia and civil service …our politicians and our leaders indulged it. But October the eighth, the day after, showed us that this is a struggle that we now have to fight. Really, it’s the same old fight against authoritarianism, against intolerance, that we’ve always been fighting. It is a battle for the liberal part of our democracies.
He believes that “the lesson of recent years is that liberals and British Jews need to call out and expose egregious cases of bigotry and racism, because it turns out most decent people support tolerance and despise intolerance and bigotry.
But the ones who don’t are the ones who’ve been making the most noise, and grabbing the headlines.
“On the other hand there are people whose words and thoughts, now so popular with a vicious, malignant, delirious squad of left/Islamist activists on the streets and social media – will not age well. Indeed, they will be regarded as a mix of moronic absurdity and malice, that should ultimately embarrass them deeply.”
I hope he’s right.
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Jonathan Sacerdoti at the Spectator on the Free Marwan Barghouti campaign:
The path to peace lies not through seasoned statesmen or regional experts, but through the collective judgment of Delia Smith, Stephen Fry, Benedict Cumberbatch, and naturally, Gary Lineker. They are joined by Mark Ruffalo, Tilda Swinton, Simon Pegg and a list of figures known for their contributions to film, fiction, and light entertainment: people with no background or expertise in jihadist Islamic terror movements, counter-extremism, Middle Eastern politics, or international law. Together, they have issued a letter calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti from Israeli prison.
Others happy to sign their names include Miriam Margolyes, Paul Simon, Naomi Klein, Sir Ian McKellen, Sting, Jarvis Cocker, Annie Lennox, Brian Eno, and Paul Weller…the list goes on. The usual suspects, you might say – always up for some easy virtue-signaling.
The letter, signed by more than two hundred ‘cultural personalities’, declares ‘grave concern’ at Barghouti’s continued incarceration, asserting that he has been denied due legal process and must be freed. The implication is clear: here is the Palestinian Mandela, wrongly jailed, broadly beloved, and uniquely placed to lead his people toward peace.
But the comparison cannot withstand scrutiny. Barghouti is not serving a political sentence. He is serving five life terms plus forty years for a series of violent crimes that left five civilians dead and many more endangered. His conviction was not for speaking out or holding office, but for directing lethal attacks carried out by bloodthirsty, religiously motivated terrorists under his authority.…
These planned, sanctioned attacks were executed within a chain of command in which Barghouti played a central role. The Tel Aviv District Court established, after a lengthy public trial, Barghouti’s operational responsibility, not just some symbolic affiliation.
The verdict did not rest on vague associations or ideological proximity. It rested on hard evidence, forensic scrutiny, and the specific legal requirement to demonstrate a direct link between the defendant and the attacks in question.…
To describe his record as anything less than deliberate, lethal wrongdoing is to strip the victims of their reality. The five people whose murders lie at the heart of his sentence were not abstract statistics; a monk driving on a quiet road, a woman stopping for fuel, diners at a restaurant and a policeman trying to save lives. Their deaths were the result of decisions taken by a man who held power in an organisation that made killing civilians a strategy. Whatever political narrative has grown around him since, these killings and the machinery of violence that enabled them, form the hard core of why he is in prison. They remain acts for which he bears direct responsibility, and which the court found to be not only unlawful but morally grave.
Yet none of this complexity appears in the coverage of the celebrity letter. The media largely echoes the petition’s language.
This absence of detail masks a deeper discomfort. For if Barghouti’s supporters were to engage honestly with the facts of his case, they would be forced to answer an obvious question: why him? Of all the possible figures in Palestinian politics, why choose a man convicted of orchestrating the killing of civilians as your heroic potential leader of a would-be ‘peace loving’ state? Could the campaign not have found someone with a less terminal CV? Perhaps a leader implicated in half as many murders – or, radical as this suggestion might be, none at all?
The answer is sobering. Barghouti retains his appeal not in spite of his record, but because of it. He commands loyalty within Palestinian society precisely because he embodies the strategy of terrorism as ‘resistance’. His political cachet derives from his status as a commander, not a conciliator. His image is built on the foundation that he is a man of action, not of compromise. And that, it seems, is what the movement demands.
The BBC, of course, has played its part in fostering this Barghouti martyr cult, with its October headline – Prominent Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti attacked by guards, family says. He was kicked and beaten, unconscious for hours, they said. The Israel Prison Service told the BBC: “These are false claims (fake)”. It all helps though in the drip feed fabrication of this tale of a resistance hero wrongfully imprisoned.
The accusations of Israel brutality against Palestinian prisoners have a long history, helped by the BBC’s willingness to believe anything that serves to demonise Israel. Back in December 2023, as I noted at the time, BBC reporter Lucy Williamson reported on the violence and abuse that Palestinians supposedly suffer at the hands of the Israelis in their jails. Eighteen-year-old Mohammed Nazzal was interviewed by Williamson, and photographed surrounded by his loving family, with his hands bandaged up after the bones were supposedly broken by a vicious beating from the Israeli prison guards. Unfortunately for this story the Israeli Prison Service had a video of Nazzal being released from jail with hands unbandaged, looking fine.
Does anyone really believe that Barghouti was attacked by the guards? – apart from the BBC and, presumably, these “cultural personalities”. It’s all part of the Palestinian playbook.
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A welcome voice.
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From the letter:
This trial is unethical in principle and unsafe in practice. The multiple foundational flaws in the PATHWAYS study design, along with the conceptual errors on which the entire protocol rests, have already been well documented.”
More importantly, the very notion of a trial designed to test whether it is appropriate to block a child’s development toward healthy adulthood is conceptually flawed. To accept the validity of such a trial is to accept the existence of the transgender child. This is exactly what Harriet Hall described as Tooth Fairy Science, where researchers gather data without ever asking whether the phenomenon under investigation exists at all. The PATHWAYS trial administers a potent endocrine disruptor to healthy adolescents on the basis of a condition that is experienced in the mind rather than rooted in the body. No amount of survey data or bone density measurements can salvage a study whose premise was mistaken from the outset….
The PATHWAYS trial will not “put the issue to bed by establishing whether the drugs are effective,” despite your recent comments in the Sunday Times. We already know that the drugs are effective. Puberty blockers halt the natural process of sexual maturation in adolescence. They stop children from developing into healthy adults. These drugs reliably block puberty, prevent the awakening of reproductive systems, impede the development of sexual function, compromise future fertility, and impair a young person’s capacity to pair bond, to fall in love, and to mature into healthy adulthood. No trial is needed to confirm any of this. We already know this.
The two-year follow-up period cannot capture the long-term consequences, because the very nature of the intervention ensures that the damage unfolds only in adulthood. Short-term satisfaction cannot be allowed to eclipse the well-documented long-term harms. This is precisely why medicine cannot be demand led. Medicine must be guided by first principles that protect the young and the vulnerable from making decisions they cannot possibly comprehend.
The entire field of “gender medicine” is still searching for a cautious route along the same misguided path rather than finding the courage to acknowledge that we took the wrong road. We cannot medicalise identity; an individual’s identity is forged through life’s experiences, not through pills.
I very much doubt that Cass will be persuaded – though it’s certainly worth making the effort with this letter. She won’t want to get involved at this late stage. Which is a shame, as Streeting is using Cass’s authority to justify the trial, claiming, ludicrously, it has “ethics and safety at its heart”.
Which of course is precisely what it doesn’t have. It’s a monstrous stain on the NHS, and on everyone involved.
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Sunshine after the rain. The Heath this morning:
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How it works.
“Let me run that by you again. The state of CA denies menopausal women the HRT they need to alleviate a legitimate medical condition, but has no problem with handing out titty skittles to convicted baby rapists who say they want to grow breasts….and then does nothing to ensure that these men are actually taking them.“
Oh, and then they claim that the estrogen these men aren’t actually taking will make it safe to incarcerate them with women.“
Mick Hartley 