Mick Hartley

Islam a misogynist religion? An Islamophobic slur, surely.

At MEMRI TV:

In a November 7, 2025 lecture at the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, Illinois, its principal imam and director, Jamal Said, stated that men are perfect, while women are governed by emotions and hormones. He said that it is wrong for a man to treat his wife as an equal and that women who demand equality with men are mistaken. Imam Said further explained that women cannot make their own decisions regarding marriage and must have a male guardian who can marry them off to a suitor. He advised Muslim women not to question Allah’s decree by asking why their 18-year-old brother can be their guardian while they are 30 years old and hold a PhD.

“The prophet Muhammad said – scientists today say – that women’s brains are smaller than those of men. Therefore, her obligations are not the same as those of men. One needs to take into account women’s emotions, unlike with men. They were created from a rib, and the most crooked part of a rib is its uttermost. If you attempt to straighten it you will break it….”

Ella Kenan on The Forgotten Origin of the ‘Free Palestine’ movement:

Long before it showed up on banners in Western protests, the phrase “Free Palestine” had an entirely different origin story. It didn’t start in the Arab world. It didn’t begin with the PLO.

It began with Jewish Zionist movements in the United States.

In the 1940s, American Jewish groups like the Zionist Organization of America (founded in 1897) and the American League for a Free Palestine (founded in 1944) ran large-scale campaigns to raise money and support for one goal: ending British rule in the Land of Israel, or what was then called the British Mandate of Palestine.

They chose the slogan “Free Palestine”, meaning, free the Jewish homeland from the British Mandate so the Jewish people could build a sovereign state.

Back then, “Palestine” referred to the British name for the land Jews had called home for over 3000 years. It was a name of a region given by the Romans instead of Judea, And “Free Palestine” meant freeing it from the British colonial rule – for the Jews.

About two decades later, in a radically different political moment, the slogan was picked up again, this time by Arab movements. In the West Bank (under Jordanian rule) and Gaza (under Egyptian rule), the newly formed PLO adopted “Free Palestine” as part of its agenda, with help from the Soviet Union, which had cut diplomatic ties with Israel, due its choice to side with the West.

The Soviets saw the Palestinian cause as a way to build an anti-Western, anti-Israel coalition across the developing world, as a way to earn a win against the U.S. during the cold war.

And it worked. With Soviet backing, the PLO built a powerful narrative that framed Israel as the root of colonial evil, and the Palestinians as its eternal victims, completely disregarding documented history and nuance.

And here we are today. “Free Palestine” now means the erasure of Israel.

Strongman recently disqualified a man who snuck into the women's category and stole a women's 1st place trophy.

Meanwhile, Canadian powerlifting celebrates a man who has openly done the same.

We still have a long way to go. https://t.co/qrYjof1vSM

— HeCheated.org (@hecheateddotorg) November 26, 2025

They don’t give up. Back in the summer The National Library of Scotland dropped The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by gender-critical women, from an exhibition after complaints from staff that it was “hate speech” comparable to racism. After a backlash the book was reinstated.

They’re at it again. From the Daily Mail:

Trans activists are trying to force the National Library of Scotland to ban a feminist book for the SECOND time by claiming its return has made the building an unsafe and hostile space for staff.

The Mail has seen an open letter signed by publishers, academics, as well as book festival staff demanding that the library’s board, who after a public outcry reinstated ‘The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht’, immediately ‘change course’.

It states:’ ‘We stand in solidarity with queer and trans staff at the National Library of Scotland, who in recent months have been subject to harassment and bigotry in their workplace.

‘We call upon the Library urgently to change course, to make a strong public commitment to ensuring that all staff and visitors are able to access the Library without fear.

‘We condemn the series of decisions by the board and senior leadership that have led to a hostile environment for queer, trans, and allied staff of and visitors to the library.’

If members of staff at a library want to ban a book, you wonder if they’re in the right job. But the trans lobby has always operated on the no-debate principle.

A report last month concluded that the National Library should take disciplinary action against the staff who used ‘threatening and inappropriate’ behaviour to get the book withdrawn.

Co-editor of the book Lucy Hunter Blackburn said: “This letter is an outrageous and unwarranted attack on a major cultural institution.

‘It makes a number of bizarre and unsubstantiated claims about the effect of including the book in the exhibition and unfounded and insulting comments about the book and its writers more generally.

‘This is no way for Scotland’s cultural life to be conducted.

‘Stifle the voices of people whose views you disagree with, or disapprove of, and you are left with a society where only a tiny, well-connected elite thrive.

‘The signatories of this letter, who claim to be drawn from the ‘academic, heritage, arts, literary and cultural sectors’, should be the very people arguing against censorship. Instead, they try to justify it by claiming “inclusivity” for themselves.’

The letter has been handed to senior management before a board meeting on Thursday who are expected to discuss the fallout from the first book ban.

The whistleblower who came forward said an explanation for why this was happening was that staff criticised in the report for their conduct may be trying to create a climate in which the board will be nervous of ordering senior management to discipline them.

We can reveal that several of those who have put their names to the letter backing staff have had or are in receipt of public money from the troubled arts quango Creative Scotland, who are funded by the Scottish Government, overseen by Culture Secretary Angus Robertson.

Jammie Booker, a man pretending to be a woman, just won the title of “World’s Strongest Woman” at the World’s Strongest Woman competition in Arlington, Texas.

Andrea Thompson, the female runner-up, had her title stolen by a man.

KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS pic.twitter.com/MYXCmOSEEc

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 25, 2025

More at the Mail. Andrea Thompson, the second-placed woman walking off – “this is bullshit” – is a Brit.

Added:

Breaking: Official Strongman Games releases statement that they will honor the rightful female champion, Andrea Thompson and restore the places to women competitors stolen by a male competitor in the Women’s Strongman World Championships.

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph adds her voice to the puberty blocker debate:

All the “Be kind” folk , the “Live and let live” people – you need to wake up. You need to understand this is where gender ideology has led: not to merry rainbow parades, but to stunting the bones and brains of small children, in an effort to prove what? That cruel and horrible mantra that they were “born in the wrong body”. How can Labour support this?

Leave it to the loony-tunes Greens and Lib Dems to spout that insanity. There is already mass revulsion and legal challenges will be mounted. The MP Rosie Duffield is organising an emergency parliamentary meeting about the trial on Nov 25.

Leave our kids alone. Harming children in the name of trans ideology is deeply wrong. The experiment must not go ahead. Distressed kids and their parents may have all drunk the KoolAid but grown-ups like Streeting have to say: “We will support you emotionally, but we will not let others destroy your body, brain and life chances”.

If Wes Streeting does not stop this trial, this will be his appalling legacy.

It’s not looking good. In reply to Kemi Badenoch’s letter strongly opposing the trial – ““activist ideology masquerading as research” – Streeting’s somewhat patronising reply:

I’ll reply formally and fully, but I’m surprised by this letter.

The Conservatives commissioned the Cass Review and accepted its recommendations in full.

I did, too, and am implementing it.

I’m keen to maintain a cross-party approach on such a sensitive issue.

There was the good part of the Cass Review, getting puberty blockers banned, and there was the bad part, suggesting a future trial. It seems obvious that the second part was an add-on, attempting to appease trans activists. It was a mistake – but Streeting makes out he can’t see it.

Bev Jackson (of LGB Alliance):

Wes, there is nothing surprising about this letter. Many of us were so relieved with the main findings of the Cass Review that we decided it was not the time to focus on its ill-advised recommendation of a clinical trial.

Furthermore, the world has changed since then. First, the Supreme Court ruling has clarified the law in ways that make a future on medication without acceptance as “the opposite sex” less attractive.

Second, the interdisciplinary HHS Review, more wide-ranging and informative, makes it absolutely clear that placing distressed children with healthy bodies on puberty blockers is medical malpractice.

Amid a wealth of dubious U-turns, Wes, cancelling this trial would be a wholly justifiable U-turn. Please listen: you don’t want to harm children and you don’t want this abomination to be your legacy.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a book by one Omar El Akkad. It won the Palestine Book Award and the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The Guardian applauded it as “powerful, angry, but compelling in its moral logic”, and for the New York Times it was “fiercely agonized,” “a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people’s calamities.” The BBC’s favourite historian David Olusoga says ” I urge you to read Omar el Akkad’s astonishing book”. The list of passionate encomiums from the great and the good is as long as anything I’ve seen on Amazon. “I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now.” “Strikes with the clarifying force of an angel.” “An extraordinary, essential work of fury and humanity…”. Well over a thousand reviews, the overwhelming majority five star, for a book published just nine months ago.

Which is strange because, as David Mikics outlines at Tablet, it’s a work of pure propaganda, unrelated in any serious way to what’s been happening in Gaza since October 7th 2023.

Omar El Akkad became famous for a tweet. On Oct. 25, 2023, he posted on X, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone account- able, everyone will always have been against this.” By “this,” the thing everyone should be against, El Akkad meant not Hamas burning people alive and murdering children in front of their parents, but instead Israel’s still nascent military response. The tweet was liked by more than 10 million people.

Early this year, El Akkad’s tweet heard round the world was expanded to a book, published to much fanfare by Knopf, titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The book goes to truly staggering lengths to avoid “calling a thing what it is,” the moral clarion call announced in El Akkad’s tweet. According to El Akkad, Israel deliberately slaughters and starves civilians, trying by every possible means to increase casualty numbers in Gaza. Hamas is almost never mentioned, and the atrocities of Oct. 7 merit only one word, “bloodbath”—though, El Akkad instantly adds, it was a perfectly understandable bloodbath, the kind of thing the oppressed are forced to do because they have no other option, “in the absence of anything resembling a future.” If someone mumbles that Palestinians have had plenty of chances to make peace with Israel and thrive side by side with the Jewish state, El Akkad condemns this objection as racist, colonialist punching down.

In a better world this review would not exist. Books like Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This would have been vetoed by major publishers for deliberate inaccuracies, and for completely lacking sources. El Akkad imagines into being scenes like the following, which he claims to have seen on video: “a girl begging for help, shortly before her execution by Israeli snipers.”

That’s a scene from the new Holocaust made to order, a child begging for her life and in answer being mercilessly slaughtered by her cold-blooded killers. Too bad it didn’t happen, one feels like saying, but actually it doesn’t matter at all that it didn’t happen, not to Hamas sympathizers like El Akkad, not to the press, not to the college activists, and not to the future mayor of New York, at least judging from his track record. The scene is so potent, so perfectly damning, that it must have happened, and that’s more than enough.

El Akkad’s book takes its place in Hamas’ current strategy, the hawking of fabricated atrocity porn. 

But read the whole article – a devastating take-down of what passes for reportage now on Israel’s fight against the Islamist terrorists. And as clear a demonstration as you could wish for of the overwhelming hatred of Israel – and, let’s face it, of Jews – that’s overwhelmed our supposedly enlightened liberal elites over the past two years. The book confirms their prejudices, so they love it.

One of El Akkad’s blurbs comes from the fiction writer Junot Díaz, who gushes, “A landmark of truth telling and moral courage, One Day is the truest, most necessary book you will ever read.” The truest of all things, which you probably don’t have the courage to admit, the bloodthirsty Jews’ commission of genocide, here takes its place along other famous truths—Poland attacked Germany in September 1939, Jewish doctors tried to kill Stalin, the Holocaust never really happened.

El Akkad repeatedly invokes his desired audience, the “people who recognize a thing for what it is.” But his book demands in every line that we see things for what they really are not. And if we don’t, well, we’re child killers, as we have been for as long as anyone can remember.

From their latest exhibition The Long Now:

From artist Rafael Gómezbarros, addressing “the fragility of the human condition, and the history of violence in his native Colombia”. Ah yes. Of course.

The paintings – the artworks – are fine. It’s a good exhibition. I enjoyed it. And we can shrug and move on when we’re confronted with the familiar over-blown art-speak: “Learning from indigenous knowledge systems and quantum physics, she engages with the idea of matter as alive and responsive. In doing so, Anderson maintains her relationship with the earth in the context of the Technocene”. Jolly good. It’s fifty years now (!) since Tom Wolfe’s “The Painted Word” We’re used to it.

The real stars of the show, though….the gallery intros.

Feel the power of that language. They read so well, these little lectures. It seems like something is being laid out here for us to comprehend: something important and profound. But….what, really? Would anyone notice if these pearls of art wisdom were swapped around between galleries? Or paragraphs, phrases, were exchanged?

I don’t think so. It’s generic.pabulum – albeit high-class generic pabulum.

Do they help, these pronouncements? Are we enlightened? Or do they perhaps just make us feel slightly smaller, as we look at these works of art, and can’t quite grasp all the powerful currents and narratives and dialogues that we’re told are so central to our appreciation….

Male commentators, the latest being David Aaronovitch, are wondering what the fuss is about. Why can’t women just be nice and use people’s – well, trans women’s – preferred pronouns. Victoria Smith at The Critic sets him straight:

At a time when the work of gender critical campaigners finally seems to be paying off, it seems we are expected to be magnanimous. We are clawing back our sports categories and rape crisis centres, are we not? No need to stick the knife in! What this misses is the fact that referring to male people as female because they wish it imposes — and always has imposed — a kind of moral injury. This is because gender is relational. Respecting someone else’s religious beliefs does not require me to share them; by contrast, using language which includes male people in the category “woman” — when I am a woman myself — forces me to express a view about myself which I do not hold. 

It’s a view that says male-imagined femininity, not femaleness, is the thing that differentiates me from men. It’s one that completely erases the difference in power as I experience it. It’s a denial of my own inner life and rejection of sexist norms, and to go along with it is humiliating. Just because it is a form of humiliation that women are used to — and have been conditioned to accept in the name of kindness — does not lessen its cruelty.

That’s the point. Saying someone’s looking fine when we see they’re not is a kindness that costs us nothing. Saying a man is a woman asks us to join in their view of what defines a woman – “femininity”, rather than the reality of sex.

A woman’s right to prioritise her perception of herself, refusing to allow it to be overridden by male fantasy, is never a luxury. It is fundamental to there being any equality between the sexes. That women have used incorrect pronouns to “be kind” before is not proof it costs us nothing. It’s merely proof of how much we have given already and how much we are owed. 

From MEMRI TV, Osama Abu Irshaid, the Executive Director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), at the Third Palestinian National Dialogue in Istanbul.

[T]he Zionist enterprise can only be dismantled if Palestinians understand that it is not limited to Israel but is a multifaceted global enterprise. He said that “Israel has blackmailed the world with the Holocaust,” claiming that it has a “monopoly” on the victim mentality. Abu Irshaid emphasized that it is imperative to establish a new narrative of the “Palestinian genocide,” adding that the “Zionist lobby” established many Holocaust museums, and that even Palestinian activists have been “influenced by this propaganda” to the extent that they left the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC, crying. He said that there are many rich Arabs and Palestinians who can build more than one Palestinian holocaust museum.

It’s so breathtakingly cynical. Never mind the historical facts, it’s all a question of presentation. Perhaps he’s been paying attention to post-modern scholarship, where there’s no truth, only power games. In Gramscian fashion, challenging the hegemonic narrative.

Anyway, the battle’s largely been won in Western academia. Hasn’t he noticed? They talk endlessly of the genocide in Gaza. Norman Finkelstein wrote The Holocaust Industry back in 2000 about the Jews exploiting the Holocaust for their own sinister ends. The door’s wide open….