Author: Mick Hartley

This story hasn't had quite the coverage it deserves. From the JC:

Police are investigating an alleged arson attack on MP Sharon Hodgson's constituency office.

A fire broke out at the office in Vermont House, Washington, last night. The cause is not yet known, but the incident is being treated as suspicious.

Hodgson, whose father was Jewish, is the vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel. Last year, in a Westminster Hall debate, she condemned the increase in antisemitic incidents in the UK and has also pushed the government to look into allegations of sexual violence carried out by Hamas on October 7.

The office was also graffitied with the words: "328 days [of] blood on your hands," which the Campaign Against Antisemitism has suggested relates to the time since the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in an Israeli drone strike.

It is not clear whether the graffiti is related to the alleged arson. If it were drawn on the same day as the fire, it would have been 329 days since Sinwar’s death….

A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: "This attack, which is particularly distressing both to Sharon Hodgson’s constituents and to the Jewish community which she has vocally supported, must be met with unequivocal condemnation.

"Violence has no place in our civic discourse. This must be the moment that the authorities finally clamp down on harassment of those we elect to represent and govern us.”

More from the BBC:

A man has been arrested on suspicion of arson after a fire at a building containing the office of Labour MP Sharon Hodgson…

Images also show graffiti on the side of the building which reads "328 days blood on ur [sic] hands," but it is believed to have been there for around a year.

A Labour source confirmed there had been a number of incidents of vandalism at Hodgson's office recently, including smashed windows.

Hmm.

Burning down an MP's constituency office – that's quite a big deal, isn't it?

This must be the worst reaction to losing a debate in the history of the Oxford Union. https://t.co/u7uiUobSk1

— Graham Linehan 🎗️ (@Glinner) September 12, 2025

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size: 11pt”>When they say no debate, they mean no debate.

The truth is that anyone who wants to debate or challenge Left-wing orthodoxy in Britain also faces risks, from losing their jobs to constant verbal abuse and serious physical threats. Women who are deemed “gender critical” receive threats of assault, rape and death. That has been my life for more than 10 years.

We have not been protected by the police or by parties of the Left. The brave MP Rosie Duffield, for instance, was warned not to go to the Labour Party conference because of such threats. Kathleen Stock had to attend debates with bodyguards.

The new parties of the hard-Left, the Greens and the Corbyn/Sultana effort, will not accept women members unless they agree that some men (those born male and who now claim to be female) are in fact women. This is the level of intolerance we have now reached.

The cheering at Kirk's murder has been particularly noticeable from trans activists, which makes the latest reports – that authorities found ammunition etched with “expressions of transgender and antifascist ideology” inside the killer's rifle – sound alarmingly plausible.

An elected representative of your own party, @RosieDuffield1, was advised by police not to attend Labour conference because of the physical risk to her from trans activists. You did nothing. You showed her no support, You criticised her for stating biological facts. pic.twitter.com/TzoXTic62Q

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 11, 2025

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If we said something like this about a transgender person we'd have the police taking the door off our hinges quicker than you can say, Sophie Molly will never be a woman! pic.twitter.com/8rv0LgWiq9

— Caroline Farrow (@CF_Farrow) September 10, 2025

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"Why do none of them fear the consequences for their vitriolic hate?" Good question.

adding-left: 40px”>Asked if he feels the university does enough to combat antisemitism on campus, Mitchell says: "My university isn't doing enough for Jewish students and also for people like me.

"The university just turns a blind eye."

New York Times promoted the UN’s precise numbers this summer. Other news sources hedged with “more than 1,000” killed, while influencers on social media simply printed the bumper stickers…

Missing from any of these information sources, however, are photographs or videos of the killings, documentary records of any kind, or any independent confirmation of the UN’s claims besides a handful of (unverified) first-person anecdotes. In a typical example, USA Today and its local-news affiliates linked a “gallery” of 22 photographs to a 4 August wire story about aid-site killings in Gaza, not one of which includes a dead person, let alone evidence of a larger atrocity. The slide-show makes clear that cameras do exist in Gaza, but we are invited to believe that not a single phone or other image-recording device documented even one of 1,400 killings that by then had allegedly taken place near crowded food-delivery locations and access routes over the course of more than two months.

In late July, a self-described “eyewitness” finally emerged—a former US Army green beret named Anthony Aguilar, who had been dismissed as a security contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. News organisations (including the BBC and PBS), websites, and numerous podcasts carried interviews with Aguilar in which he was described as a “whistleblower” and permitted to allege “barbaric” tactics and “war crimes” on the part of US security contractors and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Nobody seemed to mind that the accompanying footage from Aguilar’s body camera showed not a single killing. Aguilar’s most heart-rending story—in which he claimed to have been kissed by a grateful Palestinian boy whose killing he then witnessed—was later found to have been fabricated in every detail. The boy was never shot and remains alive. At the time of writing—four days after Aguilar’s claims had been fully discredited in early September—neither the BBC nor PBS had amended their earlier coverage.

This is, to put it mildly, something of a disgrace – though this does seem to be the level of reporting we're now getting from Gaza. 

Disproportionate responsibility for this growing detachment from reality falls on the practice of journalism, or lack thereof. Whether it’s a once-in-a-generation military atrocity, a brazen smear by the OHCHR and its allies, or a nuanced example of war’s tragedies, the Gaza food-aid story is not only a big story but also a reportable story. Yet it is not being reported. Truth is not being sought by those who were, until recently, entrusted to do so. Gaza is challenging terrain for journalists, but Geneva is not. Reporters could begin by asking the United Nations OHCHR to open its books and provide a detailed justification for what it meant by “reportedly.”

Disappearing journalism is not the only problem. Academic experts increasingly avert their eyes as well, either because they have succumbed to alternative realities themselves or simply because they fear the professional and social risks of offering basic reality checks on tribalised topics. An expert might observe, for example, that even the worst militaries learn from mistakes and adjust, which makes the rising curve of supposed butchery by the highly competent IDF around aid sites farcically implausible. The UN’s estimate of the killings rose from 798 dead on 11 July to 1,373 on 31 July to 2,146 on 4 September, as already noted.

The writer here bemoans the collapse in journalistic standards, what it says about the media now, and what it means for our society in general. Important issues, no doubt, but I can't help wondering if this is something that happens in particular when the reporting is from Gaza, and when one particular country, the Jewish state, is involved.

1ebab69e202c8d3ff1e04200c img-responsive” src=”http://mickhartley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/mt_imported_image_1759098362.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Adam5″ />

[All images © Ricky Adam]

The French Revolution was a disaster: killed 2 million people, led to the rise of Napoleon–perhaps the world's first totalitarian fascist dictator, who began wars of conquest that killed an additional 4 million people, led to the restoration of slavery, to the restoration of the… pic.twitter.com/jgzk1SRkua

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) September 9, 2025

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Full text:

The French Revolution was a disaster: killed 2 million people, led to the rise of Napoleon–perhaps the world's first totalitarian fascist dictator, who began wars of conquest that killed an additional 4 million people, led to the restoration of slavery, to the restoration of the monarchy, and a delay of democracy in France by perhaps a century.

Russian Revolution killed several million, led to the Russian Civil War–which killed another 9 million–led to the rise of Stalin, who killed 20 million.

There's an old cliché: you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Well, it ignores the fact that people aren't eggs, and that generally does not result in an omelette.

Again, the Chinese Revolution, perhaps the most disastrous event in history, led to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, killed perhaps 30 to 40 million people altogether.

Pinker started his career in psycholinguistics under the influence of Chomsky. Politically now he seems to be making up for lost time as a kind of anti-Chomsky. 

It's tragic when you think now of what could have been if the post-Mao liberalisation under Deng Xiaoping had continued, before Xi Jinping took over and turned into another Mao-style despot. Was it inevitable? – with no liberal or democratic tradition to fall back on? – the system just waiting for another authoritarian to fill the Mao-shaped hole. I don't know – but how different the world might look now…

Astonishing opening to @WyreDavies's report on @BBCr4today one the Israeli strike on Qatar. Every single element is grotesquely wrong:

"There's no love lost in Israel for Hamas or its political leadership. Most people in Israel hold them directly responsible for what happened on…

— Stephen Pollard (@stephenpollard) September 10, 2025

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"There's no love lost in Israel for Hamas or its political leadership. Most people in Israel hold them directly responsible for what happened on October 7."

"No love lost" – as if Israel has some sort of petty squabble with the organisation which committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

"Hamas or its political leadership" – as if there are two wings to Hamas, the military and the political, rather than (as every nation which proscribes it recognises) it being one terror organisation. Not for Davis, it seems.

"Most people in Israel hold them directly responsible for what happened on October 7" – as if there is some sort of question mark over who was responsible, and only a majority in Israel think it was Hamas.

This is the level of the BBC's reporting. For which we are forced to pay under threat of imprisonment.