Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

recent posts

email me

  • Consistently wrong about Israel and Islamism

    Via a comment on a Jerry Coyne post about the Nicholas Krystof affair, here’s an interesting Quillette article from Dec 2022 by Jeffrey Herf, reviewing Richard Landes’ book Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad:

    At its core, this is a compelling critique of the various journalists and public figures—especially in France, Britain, and the United States—who managed to be consistently wrong about the facts and their causes. Their errors were not random, however. Landes argues that they resulted from a combination of political biases and threats issued by Palestinian organizations. The failure of journalists, in particular, to grasp the ideological causes of the attacks on the Jewish state in 2000 helped to prevent a coherent understanding of the Islamist attacks on the United States and Europe that followed.

    Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the revolution of 1979, the publication of the Hamas Covenant in 1988, and al Qaeda’s declaration of jihad against Jews and Crusaders in 1998, the governments of the West’s liberal democracies have, with only a few exceptions, been reluctant to speak clearly about the causal connection between Islamist ideology and violence. This reluctance persisted through the Second Palestinian Intifada, the terrorist atrocities of September 11th, 2001, and those that followed in London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, and Amsterdam. The Bush administration described Islam as “a religion of peace” even as quotations from the Koran were filling terrorist manifestos, and any analysis of the connection between Islamism and terror was absent in the Obama years. The popularisation of a new term, “Islamophobia,” became a rhetorical cudgel with which to beat anyone who noticed references to Islamic texts in the Islamist literature celebrating terrorism….

    Landes writes that, as a result, much Western reporting of the Arab-Israeli conflict came to follow a four-fold approach. First, it reframed the conflict as one of an Israeli Goliath vs a Palestinian David rather than a tiny liberal democracy surrounded by theocratic and autocratic enemies. Second, it reported Palestinian claims as reliable until proven otherwise “while treating Israeli counterclaims as dubious, if not false, until proven true.” Third, it reported “as little as possible about the religious culture of genocide and terrorism that flourishes in Palestinian-controlled areas.” And fourth, it corrected “errors that result from this approach as slowly and inconspicuously as possible.”…

    The modern hatred of the Jews, Zionism, and liberal democracy emerged in Europe and the Middle East during the 1940s, persisted into the 1950s, and found global reach by the 1970s and 1980s. The anti-Zionist impulse has drawn from Nazi propaganda, Soviet campaigns during the Cold War, 1960s style anti-imperialist ideology, as well as the traditions of the Islamists. Today, it remains alive and well in the assaults and threats to Israel that Landes examines in this book.

    Richard Landes is right to call for a rereading of the Second Intifada, and to draw our attention to the way the images and interpretations of those years contributed to misunderstanding the years of terror, and to a new Islamist-inflected species of antisemitism. He makes a convincing case that, yes, “the whole world”—or at least too many very accomplished professionals in the media, public life, and politics—were indeed wrong about the causes of the terrorism directed at the Jewish state in recent decades. Twenty-two years after the Second Intifada erupted, it is time for a rethink.

    How much more this analysis applies now, since October 2023, when an act of extraordinary barbarity has been twisted by so many western apologists into some kind of heroic anti-colonial resistance.

  • Australia’s Clown Court

    An extraordinary court decision in Australia, where Sall Grover’s appeal against the earlier ruling against her has been denied, and the damages she has to pay have been doubled..

    It’s the biggest story for women’s rights in a century – the fact that women have no separate and distinguishable rights, at all, in Australia – and for @abcnews to acknowledge this, it would have to describe Tickle as a man. But ABC has never expressed editorial outrage about the restrictions it perceives on its ability accurately to report the gender identity scandal, so it won’t start now – it can’t relay the breathtaking scale of this disaster for women, because it doesn’t have the words for it any more.

    Added:

  • The real IDF dogs

  • The trans monster

    From the Telegraph:

    Frankenstein is transphobic because it is about “a constructed body”, a non-binary filmmaker has claimed.

    Jane Schoenbrun, an American director who describes herself as trans and queer, said the Frankenstein adaptations, based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel, are an example of older horror films featuring a “trans monster”.

    “This image of the trans monster kept coming up, whether that be Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill or Frankenstein as a constructed body, and there was this lineage of trans people having really complicated feelings about those movies,” Schoenbrun told The Hollywood Reporter.

    “In one sense, those are the places where they saw representations that felt familiar or comforting in some way to their own experiences – but also, those movies are super f—ing transphobic and problematic,” the filmmaker added.

    The everyday oppression that trans people have to suffer in this cruel cis-oriented world! Does it ever end?

  • The feedback loop of bullshit

    Jake Wallis Simons at Spiked – Israeli rape dogs? The New York Times is barking mad:

    The central and most ludicrous allegation, and the one that has understandably attracted most attention, is that Israeli forces somehow trained dogs to rape Palestinian detainees. This assertion, which obviously lacks credible evidence, has been repeated by the likes of Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, an Israelophobic firebrand academic who left the University of California, Los Angeles, after he was accused of repeated sexual harassment of minors.

    Euro-Med included the dogs shtick – without forensic evidence or independently verifiable corroboration – in a report in 2024, after which it was picked up by Al Jazeera. In April, it was repeated in a second Euro-Med paper and amplified by that distinguished online outlet, Middle East Eye, before being seized upon by the left-wing agitator Owen Jones, who included it on his Substack. Francesca Albanese, the swivel-eyed Israelophobe employed by the United Nations, repeated it, followed by Kristof at the New York Times. In an illustration of the feedback loop of bullshit, Owen Jones has now posted a Substack article entitled ‘New York Times confirms Israel using dogs to rape’.

    It is worth recalling that two months after October 7, Jones watched a video of the brutality and concluded that ‘if there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see that on camera’, even though the Israel Defence Forces said that it only included footage that ‘preserved the dignity’ of the victims and their families. The body of a partly burned female corpse with no underwear was ‘not what you would consider conclusive evidence of rape’, Jones insisted. But sex dogs? That he found convincing.

    It’s certainly drawn out the antisemites, this nonsense. Owen Jones we expect, but yes, it gets kind of worrying when it also includes UN representatives. and the mainstream media.

    Aside from the raw anti-Semitism that is now running riot through all our most venerable institutions, the worst thing about all this is the fact that the mainstream media are throwing away their own credibility. Speaking on my podcast, The Brink, last year, the American journalist Bari Weiss put it perfectly. ‘There is a crisis of trustworthiness’, she said. ‘You should not trust something that’s not worthy of your trust.’ The effect is to drive audiences into the unregulated Wild West of amateur commentators online, to clickbait merchants like Piers Morgan and, finally, to conspiracy theorists.

    It’s a kind of horseshoe theory, I suppose. The New York Times – and other outlets like the BBC, which has had its share of similar scandals – has now proven itself to be up there with the likes of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. The only difference is pedigree. We’ll miss the truth when it’s gone.

  • Regressive ideas under the cover of progressive rhetoric

    Andrew Doyle spells it out:

    In yesterday’s King’s Speech, the government announced its Draft Conversion Practices Bill, which seeks to ‘prohibit practices whose predetermined purpose is to change a person’s sexual orientation or to change a person to or from being transgender’. In practice, this risks the criminalisation of medical professionals who offer much-needed therapeutic services for those who believe they have been ‘born in the wrong body’.

    This is a linguistic minefield, an instance of regressive ideas being smuggled in under the cover of progressive rhetoric. Most of us understand ‘conversion therapy’ to be those ghastly practices from decades ago when crank doctors would resort to electric shocks to ‘cure’ gay men, or the horrific ongoing incidents of the ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians. These are already, quite rightly, illegal. The government’s new bill is concerned with an entirely different phenomenon.

    The key to understanding the bill is in its ‘trans-inclusive’ nature. It is based on the fundamental error that ‘gender identity’ is a fixed essence or soul rather than an ideological principle. Under Labour’s new law, if a young person tells a doctor that he or she is ‘in the wrong body’, the belief must be automatically affirmed. Yet the overwhelming majority of young people who are confused about their gender are simply same-sex attracted. Homosexuality is routinely being diagnosed as ‘gender dysphoria’ and medically ‘corrected’.

    Thanks to the work of Hannah Barnes, we can be specific about the statistics. In her book Time to Think, Barnes revealed that between 80 to 90 percent of adolescents who were referred to the Tavistock paediatric gender clinic were same-sex attracted. We have known for a long time that there is a strong correlation between gender nonconformity in youth and being gay in adult life. Members of the staff at the Tavistock itself joked that ‘soon there would be no gay people left’ and whistleblowers revealed that homophobia was endemic. In other words, children who are likely to grow up gay were being medicalised to better conform with stereotypical heterosexual paradigms.

    This is why Labour’s trans-inclusive ban on ‘conversion therapy’ amounts to a form of gay conversion therapy. Organisations such as LGB Alliance and Gay Men’s Network have painstakingly outlined the reasons why this is such a regressive step. The government has repeatedly been presented with the facts but has chosen to ignore them, seemingly determined to roll back gay rights in the name of ‘progress’.

    Even when homosexuality is not a factor, the ‘gender-affirming’ approach fails to address the reasons for feelings of gender dysphoria. Barnes’s research showed that the Tavistock clinic ‘ignored evidence that 97.5 per cent of children seeking sex changes had autism, depression or other problems that might have explained their unhappiness’. With only 2% of the country’s children suffering from an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), why did 35% of referrals to the Tavistock fit into this category? Apparently, the government is not interested in the answer.

    This, in other words, is the real conversion therapy. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

  • Labour’s lemmings

    Unsurprisingly even a leadership coup seems beyond the capabilities of Labour at the moment. A Keep Starmer sentiment appears to be on the rise. Juliet Samuel in the Times – Labour’s lemmings will regret their big jump:.

    I never thought they’d get to this point but if there’s one thing I feel sure about, it’s that they are making a mistake. Look at the likely candidates to replace their useless prime minister. There’s Wes Streeting, whose every syllable reeks of triangulating guile; Angela Rayner, whose only true political passion is yelling at poshos; Ed Miliband (God help us), a man so far down the rabbit hole of climate millenarianism that he’d rather suffocate than turn around; and the seat-less Andy Burnham, of whom the best that can be said is we shouldn’t attach too much meaning to anything he says, because he certainly doesn’t.

    Added:

  • Emptying the room

  • Not permitting men in female facilities

    A victory for women:

    A Muslim NHS England employee is set for a payout of thousands of pounds after bosses discriminated against her by allowing trans women to use single sex lavatories.

    Lawyers for the woman, who was anonymised in an employment tribunal ruling, forecast that she could receive up to £25,000 in compensation after a judge backed the challenge to the quango’s trans equality procedure. 

    The employee sued health bosses over claims that she suffered discrimination and harassment because of her belief that biology defined men and women.

    Her case centred on policies adopted by NHS England in 2017, which stated that trans colleagues could use the single-sex facilities, including lavatories and showers, that corresponded with their gender identity once they reached “full-time presentation … in the new gender role”.

    Five years after the policy was put in place, the woman received an email announcing the transition of a colleague. She was asked to attend a “trans awareness session”, which prompted the woman to complain formally.

    The woman argued that the policy indirectly discriminated against women generally, Muslim women specifically, as well as women with post-traumatic stress disorder that was caused by male sexual violence.

    Excellent news. Though it’s to be hoped that it’s not just the the Muslim bit that got the verdict over the line. It’s not just Muslim women who object to men in women’s spaces.

    “…was harassment in relation to GC belief.”

  • Israel’s animal helpers

    Dolphins, wild pigs, cattle, rats, a vulture, sharks, a kestrel, squirrels, lizards, hyenas. Rapist dogs are just the latest. See Jon Levine’s thread…