Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • The trans reckoning

    Stella O’Malley at Spiked:

    The reckoning is finally arriving, echoing the dilemma in Eugene Genovese’s powerful essay, ‘The Question’. Writing in 1994, Genovese confessed that he and many others had remained loyal to the Soviet Union long after they knew about the mass killings and the gulags. ‘For many years’, he admitted, ‘I have lived in dread of having to answer The Question… “What did you know, and when did you know it?”’ Eventually, he acknowledged the uncomfortable truth: ‘We knew everything essential and knew it from the beginning.’ Many mainstream journalists will soon find themselves confronting the same question.

    A dramatic start. Well, fair enough. Staying quiet in the face of the gender cult spread may not be quite at the “ignoring mass killings and the gulags” level, but it’s the same cowardice – people turning a blind eye for the sake of their careers, or simply for the sake of not being thought of as a bad person by their friends and colleagues.

    The tide, it seems, is now beginning to turn. Many of us cheered when, in June, BBC newsreader Martine Croxall raised her eyebrows and exasperatedly corrected ‘pregnant people’ to ‘women’ in a live broadcast. Yet most of the comfortable professional class, particularly journalists, still can’t bring themselves to get involved.

    This is the true disgrace. They know vulnerable children will be irreversibly damaged by experimental medical treatment. They know vulnerable women are sharing prison cells with male sex offenders. They know violent rapists are living in domestic-abuse shelters among the most vulnerable women and children. They also know honest and ethical professionals – like myself – are being mercilessly cancelled for shining a light on these issues.…

    These weren’t a few mistakes. This was a sustained abdication of responsibility that justified the sterilisation of children, the positioning of men in women’s spaces and sports and the erasure of what it means to be lesbian or gay. Lives continue to be destroyed. Parents have been devastated, and detransitioners still cannot access appropriate care. We need a reckoning, not amnesia or post-hoc excuses.

    Those of us who have been treated badly are furious. I’m a psychotherapist, a wife and a mother of two living in rural Ireland. I had no wish to become consumed by a medical scandal that the media refused to confront. All I needed was for journalists to do their job and the truth would have surfaced. They didn’t.

    If academics, doctors and clinicians had done theirs, we wouldn’t have needed journalists to expose the scandal. But they didn’t meet their responsibilities and, above all, the journalists failed to report what was happening.…

    A trans-Glasnost is dawning. The curtain of denial and intimidation is lifting. And Genovese’s question hangs in the air: what did you know, and when did you know it?

    She’s quite right to be angry, of course.

  • At the School Things Factory

    From North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun:

    Kim Jong Un, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and president of the State Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, gave field guidance at the School Things Factory and the School Fixtures Factory under construction on November ４.

    It’s the usual unhappy official style.

    He earnestly requested all the soldier-builders to complete the construction projects for strengthening the educational foundation of the country into the monumental edifices clearly demonstrating the eye-opening development of our times, bearing deep in mind the pride and responsibility that they are building creations directly related to the future of the country by their own efforts true to the plan and intention of the Party Central Committee.

    True to his militant call, the soldier-builders firmly pledged to attain a successful result to materialize the desire of the WPK as early as possible through high-pitched struggle and make a report of glory and loyalty to the Party Central Committee.

    Where next? The Bomb Things Factory? The Steel Things Factory? The Pointed Things Factory?

    There’s a “Kim Jong-un looking at things” meme. YouTube, or a list. Maybe next, Kim Jong-un giving field guidance at things factories.

  • Things to do with Palestine

    There were rumours of a split in the Your Party leadership between Jeremy Corbyn and arch Israel hater Zarah Sultana. Corbyn has now seen the writing on the wall, and is fully committed to Sultana’s brand of antisemitism anti-Zionism. What took him so long?

    Jeremy Corbyn has declared his new political party’s commitment to “absolute opposition to Zionism,” signalling a shift toward the hardline anti-Israel stance backed by Zarah Sultana….

    Sultana, MP for Coventry South, has consistently advocated for a staunchly anti-Zionist platform, while Corbyn had previously been less explicit about his stance.

    At Sunday’s meeting, Corbyn stated: “The whole Zionist project was about expanding Israel forevermore, which is exactly what Netanyahu is doing with the Greater Israel project. So, yes—absolute opposition to Zionism, and absolute solidarity with the people of Palestine.”…

    Corbyn also mentioned he is writing “a very long article at the moment on things to do with Palestine that I’ve been involved with over the past 40 years,” adding that the situation had become even more “horrific.”

    Something to look forward to.

    He added, “And now we have the genocide, and it is a genocide in Gaza. We in Your Party are absolutely in solidarity with the people of Palestine, and will be guided by them on the policies we develop and the direction we take going forward.”

    Guided by Hamas, then.

    Further tensions have emerged at the top of the party over £800,000 in donations, currently held by Sultana via MoU Operations Ltd, while Your Party awaits formal registration.

    Senior members have accused Sultana of withholding the funds, though her spokesperson states she is “in the process of transferring all funds and data” after completing due diligence.

    The money’s just resting in her account.

  • Men in women’s sport

    On the BBC’s celebration of transified men in women’s sport, from the Telegraph:

    BBC bosses “ignored” warnings about pro-transgender bias in its sports coverage, The Telegraph can reveal.

    Messages seen by The Telegraph reveal that female staff repeatedly raised concerns over several years about the nature of reporting on gender issues.

    BBC Sport bosses were told almost five years ago that stories about trans athletes were often uncritical and celebratory “puff pieces”, while glossing over any potentially negative impact on women’s sports.

    However, insiders claim that the BBC persisted with overwhelmingly positive coverage of otherwise controversial athletes, including Lia Thomas, the biologically male swimmer, the weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, the cyclist Austin Killips and Imane Khelif, the boxer.

    Concerns were also raised about biologically male athletes who were referred to as transgender “females”, a practice that appeared to confuse sex for gender and to go against the BBC’s own style guide.

    BBC staff have reported feeling ignored and feeling unable to voice opinions that went against the prevailing orthodoxy of affirming transgender identity.

    The reporting on this subject is always presented as though trans people were generically being banned from participating in sport, when of course what’s being banned is men competing in women’s sport. More people, happily, are now getting this. No thanks to the BBC.

    BBC Sport is currently led by Alex Kay-Jelski, who faced criticism for a column he wrote for The Times in 2019 while he was the newspaper’s sports editor.

    In the piece, he wrote that Martina Navratilova, the nine-time Wimbledon champion, and the Olympic swimming medallist Sharron Davies, both vocal opponents of allowing biological males to compete in women’s categories, were “not experts” on the matter of trans participation in sport.

    Mr Kay-Jelski appeared to compare those who portrayed trans athletes as being “threatening” to racists who warned, “Don’t let black men in the same shops as you or they’ll rape your women”.

    Will Mr Kay-Jelski now resign – or be sacked?

  • The BBC has become the agent of disinformation

    The BBC’s Panorama on Trump is claiming all the headlines – largely because of Trump’s threat to sue. This makes it easier for the Beeb’s apologists: it was just a one-off error of judgement. The real scandal, though, is the long-term bias, on trans issues, and on Israel.

    Stephen Pollard at the JC:

    Clearly it was wrong to have edited the Trump speech so badly. But while the mindset behind such behaviour is indicative of the BBC malaise – we know x is true, so even if y isn’t actually true, we will report it because it makes it even clearer how true x is – the most damning parts of the memo written by Michael Prescott, the BBC’s former adviser on editorial issues, actually relate to two other areas: the BBC’s coverage of Gaza and the Middle East, and its approach to trans issues.

    Melanie Phillips in the Times:

    No 10 has said the prime minister does not believe the BBC is “institutionally biased” and that it was right to continue to support the BBC, particularly “in an age of disinformation”. But the BBC has become the agent of disinformation.

    Jake Wallis Simons at Spiked:

    In the light of the findings, it is no exaggeration to say that the BBC has long been functioning as the propaganda arm of Hamas, funded by the British public. That is an extraordinary sentence to have written. But it is the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn.

    For years, the broadcaster has been brushing this stuff under the carpet. In responding principally to the Trump allegations and largely ignoring the material on its anti-Israel bias, the BBC is pulling out the same playbook, hoping that when the dust settles, it will be back to business as usual.

    The depressing thing is, it is probably right.

  • ‘No regrets’

  • The rot at the BBC

    There’s that other BBC bias factor, of course: their Gaza coverage, and their hatred of Israel. Jonathan Sacerdoti at the Spectator:

    The organisation’s bias is not subtle. It is not occasional. It is systematic. Certain worldviews are endlessly reinforced and opposing views treated as aberrations. This intellectual monoculture has had profound consequences. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the BBC’s reporting on the Middle East. Over the past two years, its coverage has descended into a mire of distortion, omission, and outright calumny, particularly in its treatment of Israel. Whether born of groupthink or malice, the result is the same: the British public has been misled, repeatedly and egregiously. But the BBC has actually been guilty of this for decades.

    One need only consider the BBC Arabic service. Despite ample warnings, the corporation has employed individuals with clear records of anti-Semitism and radical bias. These are not idle accusations. Translations and investigations have exposed journalists and guests who have praised the savage assault on Israel on October 7, even invoking Hitler approvingly in reference to Jews. These individuals have been broadcast multiple times.

    The departure of two high-profile executives won’t change any of the machine beneath them that constantly produces this material. Why does the world need another Arabic propaganda channel?

    It’s not just BBC Arabic: it’s also the BBC’s top journalists, like Jeremy Bowen, and Lucy Williamson [see here].

    When Jeremy Bowen, one of the BBC’s most senior correspondents, claimed that an Israeli strike had ‘flattened’ a hospital which other reports claimed resulted in 500 deaths, he was not engaging in intelligent reporting. He was making a claim unsupported by evidence. Those familiar with the region and with Israel’s military record could see immediately that the scene bore the hallmarks of a Palestinian rocket misfire. That is, in fact, what it was. Bowen has since refused to express regret. Whether intentional or not, the effect was the same, and the falsehood was aired as truth.

    One mistake may be an error, two misfortune, but when the same pattern recurs over decades, always leaning in one direction, it looks like a habit or worse, a culture. The BBC has repeatedly blurred moral lines on Israel and antisemitism: it refused to call Hamas ‘terrorist’ even after October 7; mistranslated ‘Jews’ as ‘Israelis’ and scrubbed the word ‘jihad’ from subtitles to hide Palestinian antisemitism; and misrepresented Jewish children attacked on Oxford Street by suggesting they had used anti-Muslim slurs – an allegation later disproven.…

  • The Gender Red Guards

    This is absolutely damning, on Cath Leng in the Times – ‘I was forced out of BBC News over gender critical views’::

    A BBC News at Ten editor “deferred” to a junior reporter on what language he should use when reporting transgender stories, a veteran BBC broadcast journalist has claimed.

    Cath Leng, a former chief writer for BBC News, also alleged that she was “forced out” in 2023 over her gender critical views after 25 years of working for the corporation.

    She claimed that journalists and editors across BBC News were “complicit” in the censorship of stories that reflected the gender critical side of the trans debate.…

    Leng echoed [Michael Prescott’s] claims, and said that younger LBGT reporters on the “learning and identity” desk often acted as “gatekeepers” on trans stories. She added: “If it was mentioned that ‘identity’ is aware of this or ‘identity’ say they’re looking at it — that was enough to stop anybody else going anywhere near it.”

    Such reporters were also regarded as “experts” on transgender issues by older, more experienced editors, Leng said. She alleged that she witnessed a senior News at Ten editor deferring to a junior LGBT broadcast journalist, “asking him what language they should use, what kind of flag they should use when they’re doing a story about Pride”.

    “These people were treated as experts simply because they were believers in the idea of gender identity,” Leng added. “The reason they were considered to have expertise is of course because nobody else understands it.

    “So they’re allowed to spout this gobbledegook and they’re treated as experts when it comes to which language to use.”

    The old fogeys, desperate not to seem reactionary and behind the times, deferred to the new Gender Red Guards. But Red Guards can only thrive when they’re supported from the top.

    The journalist said she began pitching gender critical stories that were being covered in many other mainstream news outlets, but they were continually ignored. These included the high-profile employment tribunal of Maya Forstater, a think tank researcher who was sacked for her views and went on to win her case, setting a legal precedent that “gender critical beliefs” were protected in law.

    Leng said: “I just got blanked, completely blanked. Then when you push it next time, you’re accused of having an agenda. That’s how it worked. I was routinely accused of bias and inappropriate behaviour by my colleagues and editors.”

    She claimed that when she suggested booking guests from gender critical organisations to be interviewed on BBC News she was stonewalled. “There seemed to be a blacklist on people like Sex Matters, Transgender Trend and LGB Alliance,” she said.

    Stonewalled. Ha. Exactly.

    Leng alleges that a culture of fear developed among BBC staff, who dared not suggest any stories that threw a negative light on trans activism in case they were unofficially blackballed. “Nobody actually has to say anything to you,” she said. “It’s just that opportunities are denied, you get given crappy shifts, you are stuck on the desk rewriting copy.”

    An organisation taken over by a cult.

  • BBC trans propaganda

    Interesting thread.

  • The gender bias is overwhelming