Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • NYC and Iran

    Ben Appel at the New York Post:

    The New York Times reported last month on the dire situation for gay people in Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death. Many are pressured to undergo brutal reassignment surgeries to live as the opposite sex. Now, instead of effeminate gay men, they’re just run-of-the-mill straight women. Problem solved.

    What Iran has effectively built is a medical system that treats homosexuality as a defect to be surgically erased. The goal isn’t self-expression; it’s social conformity. Transition becomes a tool of state-enforced heterosexuality.

    Ring any bells?

    Here, the process of medically engineering gays into pseudo-straight people starts even earlier. Sissy boys who like Barbies are fed puberty blockers, which prevent their voices from deepening, facial hair from growing and shoulders from broadening. That way, they’ll have an even better chance of “passing” as female.

    In Iran, this pressure comes from the state. In America, the pressure is cultural and medical rather than legal, but the result is eerily similar: Gender-nonconforming kids, many of whom would simply grow up to be gay, are rerouted onto a medicalized track.

    Suppress a boy’s puberty, inject him with estrogen, get him on the operating table, and voilà — you’ve transed the gay away.

    We once understood that many gay adults were gender-nonconforming kids. Now we treat that nonconformity as a sign of being “born in the wrong body” rather than a natural part of growing into a gay identity.

    And guess who wants to expand access to these regressive practices? Zohran Mamdani, whose mayoral campaign was fueled by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Yes, the same CAIR linked to Iran-backed Hamas.

    The irony is almost too on-the-nose: A politician supported by groups tied to regimes that persecute gays is championing policies that disproportionately pathologize gender-nonconforming kids here at home.

    During his campaign, Mamdani pledged to invest $65 million in gender clinicians and vowed to turn our city into a national hub for this mad science.

    In effect, Mamdani wants New York to mirror the very ideology that erases gay people in places like Iran, except he sells it as “progress.”

    What makes the American version of this ideology so insidious is that it wraps itself in the language of liberation. In Iran, the state is at least honest about what it’s doing: It claims being gay is a perversion that must be corrected, and it uses medical interventions to enforce heterosexuality.

    Here, the same logic is marketed as “gender-affirming care.” We’re told that stopping a child’s puberty is a compassionate act. We’re told that halting sexual maturation is “lifesaving.” The procedures themselves haven’t changed (breast removal, genital surgeries, chemical castration), but the branding has.

    It’s quite the combination with Mamdani: pushing “gender-affirming care”, and cheering on Hamas. “The struggle for Palestinian liberation is at the core of my politics and continues to be”: “We have to make it clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF”.

  • An “incendiary and morally inverted accusation”

    The Archbishop of York joins the chorus. From the JC:

    The Archbishop of York has said Israeli forces have committed “genocidal acts” in Gaza in remarks the Chief Rabbi has condemned as an “incendiary and morally inverted accusation”.

    The second-most senior figure in the Church of England suggested the IDF were responsible for “deliberately indiscriminate acts”, in comments reported in the Church Times.

    He’s been watching the BBC.

    Archbishop Stephen Cottrell said: “When hospitals and schools are targeted, when children are targeted . . . I wonder what other language we use to describe what is happening.

    Well, you might consider listening to the other side for once.

    The JLC [Jewish Leadership Council] said in a statement: “We are deeply disappointed by the the Archbishop of York’s choice of language. In particular, his accusation of ‘genocidal acts’ is not only a factual error, but a perverse distortion of a conflict initiated by a terrorist group which seeks the destruction of the Jewish state through indiscriminate murder.

    “At a time of growing division in the UK, as politicians and activists compete to use the most extreme rhetoric on events in the Middle East, the Archbishop’s words demonstrate a failure to understand the devastating impact this behaviour has on the Jewish community here.

    “Over the past two years, we have seen how antisemites have become emboldened to attack Jews in the UK using the backdrop of foreign affairs as an excuse.

    “Instead of acting in the best interests of peace and compassion, the Archbishop has chosen to present a loaded and incorrect narrative.”

  • A huge mistake

    By not ordering another one? Or by covering it up better?

  • Red hands

    More on that Oxford Union cancellation (yesterday).

    The red hands, in Palestinian iconography, celebrate the Ramallah lynching in October 2000, when two Israeli reservists strayed by mistake into Palestinian territory:

    According to accounts, rumors spread that Israeli undercover agents were being detained at the police station, prompting a crowd of over 1,000 to gather calling for their deaths. While Israeli intelligence got word that the reservists were being detained and a crowd was gathering, the IDF allegedly decided against a rescue operation due to the presence of PA security forces in the area. Haaretz and Maariv, The Jerusalem Post’s sister publication, also reported that 13 Palestinian policemen were injured trying to prevent the mob from storming the station and conducting the lynching. 

    The IDF reservists were murdered by the crowd via beatings and stabbings, with one Italian news outlet later capturing the infamous photo Aziz Salha raising his blood-soaked hands to the cheering crowd. The reservists’ bodies were then thrown out the window, mutilated and set on fire. The bodies were then dragged to Al-Manara Square in the city center. PA security forces, aware of the seriousness, attempted to confiscate film showing the events.  

  • In line with the tendency Gramsci identified

  • A core strategy for regime survival

    From the Daily NK:

    The North Korean authorities have recently begun patting themselves on the back for bringing religion under control, claiming that “organized underground services and secret prayer groups have almost disappeared.” The authorities believe that religious activity has been practically exterminated, which they consider to be a significant win in stabilizing the regime.

    “Exterminated” is a strong word here, where you might reasonably expect “eliminated”. Probably appropriate in the circumstances though.

    According to a Daily NK source in North Korea recently, the North Korean authorities credit this success to intensified crackdowns by the Ministry of State Security’s counterintelligence departments since the enactment of the Youth Education Guarantee Act in September 2021.

    Article 41 of the Youth Education Guarantee Act includes religious acts on its list of activities young people must eschew. Since the law was enacted four years ago, the Ministry of State Security’s counterintelligence departments have kept a very close eye on such activities, as well as on similar behavior….

    “The authorities doubly or triply watch people who have studied abroad or workers who were sent abroad—people who have experience living overseas,” the source said. “If they are caught engaging in religious activity after they return home, they are immediately arrested.”

    The primary targets of the crackdowns are Protestants and Catholics. As a matter of internal policy, such people are “sent straight to political prison camps.” Buddhists and people engaged in folk beliefs are also targeted, but they receive lighter punishments.…

    “(North Korea’s) religious repression goes beyond simply control—it’s a core strategy for regime survival,” the source said. “The dominant belief is that religious oppression will continue for as long as the regime lasts.”

    Religion is obviously a threat to the regime, and especially Christianity, with its emphasis on the individual conscience. No alternative to Kim worship can be tolerated, and certainly nothing that encourages people to think for themselves.

  • The PATHWAYS trial

    The puberty blocker trial is the one big mis-step from the otherwise excellent Cass Review. You can perhaps see why she – Baroness Cass – thought it would be a good idea, providing some clarity in an otherwise murky area where there are more anecdotes than facts.

    It would no doubt be helpful to have more information on the effect of these drugs on young “gender dysphoric” children, but this is an appalling way to go about it. Giving a drug that we know very well has powerful effects on a child’s development fails every moral test. It’s treating vulnerable children as guinea pigs. And we have thousands of children who went through this at the Tavistock Clinic, where no one bothered with follow-up data. This could surely be pursued.

    MP Rebecca Paul has been pursuing this with the government. Here’s her latest letter.

    A key point at no. 6: is there any precedent in the UK for paediatric clinical trials with the same level of risk of long-term harm?

    The whole business stinks. It’s not medicine – more like a sop to the trans lobby, who like to complain about the lack of “affirming care” for trans children, when of course trans children are a social-media driven affectation, largely affecting gay children struggling with their puberty. It needs to be stopped.

  • Mandating perjury

    More from Stella O’Malley (yesterday):

  • Civil Service diversity

    Interesting. From the Telegraph:

    At least 500 civil servants are employed across Government to police and develop diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies, The Telegraph can reveal.

    Some Whitehall departments have seen the numbers of staff whose jobs involve overseeing equality, diversity, inclusion, gender, LGBT or race policies double in the past year since Labour came to power.

    The figures have only been extracted from Whitehall after a two-year battle by the MP Neil O’Brien, who used freedom of information (FOI) laws and parliamentary questions to counter attempts by officials and ministers to block the release of the figures. They are an underestimate as some departments have still refused to answer.

    The Ministry of Defence (MoD) alone employs 77 staff who have job titles that include the words equality, diversity, inclusion, gender, LGBT and race. This is ostensibly the biggest number employed in any single Whitehall department barring the Cabinet Office, which has a central co-ordinating role for DEI policies.

    Dominic Cummings may have been something of a disaster in his time as Boris Johnson’s whizz kid with the big ideas, but he had some good points about “the blob”, and the need to cut down on the bloated civil service.

    There are now 180 staff in the Office for Equality and Opportunity – formerly the Equality Hub – which leads Government policy in this area and is based in the Cabinet Office. This compares with just 28 staff that it admitted it employed with DEI, gender, LGBT or race in job titles as of December 2023. Outside of the Cabinet Office’s central equality teams, there are around 330 DEI staff, bringing the known total to 510.…

    Assuming an average salary of £55,000 for each civil servant with a DEI or similar role, the pay bill for the 510 staff would be at least £28.1 million a year.

  • Oxford Union cancellation

    The Oxford shame continues. From Jewish News:

    Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was prevented from speaking at the Oxford Union on Sunday, after protestors blocked the entrance to the debating society’s building, as well as invading the union’s premises itself.

    Security were forced to physically eject protestors from the union’s grounds, with the entire event cancelled as a result. Some of the anti-Israel protestors present, had painted their hands red to symbolise the accusation that those attending the event had “blood on your hands”.

    But that’s not what it means in pro-Palestinian circles.

    For those with actual knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, red hands symbolise the lynching of two Israelis by Palestinians in the West Bank during the second intifada, with one of the murderers holding up bloodied hands to the acclamation of crowds outside the building where the killings took place.

    [See here for the gruesome details.]

    Those ejected from the building screamed about “complicity in genocide” and chanted the “from the river to the sea” slogan. Olmert has been a vocal public critic of the current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

    They don’t care, the demonstrators. He’s a Zio, isn’t he?