Author: Mick Hartley

  • Getting mad at Israel

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Also the hostage rescue at Entebbe. Also the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Etc. etc..

    The BBC – Bowen: Diplomacy in ruins after Israel strikes Hamas leaders in Qatar.

    What diplomacy, ffs? This is Hamas: not some kind of liberation movement, as the BBC love to think, but a terrorist group committed to the destruction of Israel. Not people interested in a deal, but people dedicated to an Islamist world-view that has no place for Jews – any Jews – in their vision of Palestine.

    Hamas and the rest of them – Hezbollah, the Houthis, Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and their sponsors in the Qatari and Iranian governments  – aren't interested in peace with Israel. They and their predecessors and the surrounding Muslim countries have been fighting for the destruction of the Jewish state ever since its foundation. Peace and statehood have been on offer since 1947 and have been spurned on every occasion.

    The Gazans had autonomy and the opportunity for prosperity in 2005 but instead they opted for the genocidal ideology of Hamas, and permanent warfare – enabled and encouraged by UNRWA. It can't go on. Some Middle East countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are, perhaps, beginning to realise this. Not the BBC though.

  • The carceral logics of racial capitalism

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Journal

    We need to preserve these gems for future generations.

  • “A hotbed of fascism”

    This is grim.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Full text:

    According to him, he feels "very sorry for the Finnish people, who do not deserve the fate and situation they now find themselves in."

    "But if this utterly incompetent policy of Finland's current leadership leads to any tragic consequences, then that will be on their conscience. We know how to defend our interests, and we are prepared for any possible developments," he said.

  • An aura of untouchable purity

    or white international reporters, now the image of a white woman mingling ‘authentically’ with societies that are arguably some of the most hostile environments for women is a new prestigious symbol.

    But yes, read it all.

  • Elaborate political theatre

    sand upon thousand of saps slaughtered in Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine for no reason beyond the survival and aggrandisement of Kim Jong-un, they're fooling the people in the cruellest way.

    Well…what else is new.

    This image from Korean Central Television of Kim Jong Un mourning while caressing a coffin containing the remains of a North Korean soldier who died on deployment to Russia was displayed in the background of an artistic performance at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater on June 29 with Russian Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova in attendance.

    20250706_lsy

  • The state of policing

    his deranged, obsessive, anger-filled man. This has been going on for ages….

    I am in the throes of writing all this up for the Critic, the magazine where I have a regular column, but wanted to give a bit of a taster here, since that won’t be online for a while. In the meantime you can read an excellent overview of Watson’s career by blogger Stuart Campbell (Wings Over Scotland), another of Watson’s victims, and Stuart’s overview of the similar activities of one of Watson’s associates, Stephanie Hayden. The details are scarcely credible, but I can assure you that the reality is actually far worse — Stuart couldn’t possibly include it all because it would be impossible for anyone to follow.

    For now, I’ll just finish by saying that this has been an incredibly dispiriting insight into the state of policing….

  • A dope

    s://twitter.com/_CryMiaRiver/status/1965155081038561553?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>September 8, 2025

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Full interview on YouTube here.

    Added:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  • The case of the missing “a”

    I posted the other day about Cathy Larkman, visited by the police for "deadnaming". Here she is on Talk TV:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  • New policing guidelines

    It's the College of Policing we have to thank for the advice to police forces that they should "record all 'non-crime hate incidents' – incidents that are perceived to be motivated by hostility but are not criminal offences". How well that's worked out we can see from the Graham Linehan farce.

    And now:

    Transgender women are at risk of female genital mutilation, the College of Policing has claimed.

    New policing guidelines issued by the taxpayer-funded quango state that trans women could be forced to undergo female genital mutilation, despite them being biologically male.

    The suggestion that they might be forced to suffer mutilation specifically intended for young girls has been branded as “insulting” to victims.

    It's certainly insulting to our intelligence. They'd need to have the female genitals somehow installed before being brutally removed.

    Introduced in August, the guidance states that “as well as women and girls”, these orders protect “any other person who has female genitalia… and is at risk of harm from these practices and procedures”.

    This includes “intersex, non-binary, trans men and women, with or without a gender recognition certificate”.

    The college is now reviewing the guidance following the UK Supreme Court ruling that a woman is defined by biological sex under the Equality Act 2010.

    Oh dear. Maybe it's time for the College of Policing to be excised.

  • People with reputations to protect

    Victoria Smith at The Critic on Malcolm Gladwell:

    Until this issue arose, I had no idea how many self-styled “good” people will support bad things on the basis that other, less important people can take all the hits. Maybe I was incredibly naïve, but I thought of my political opponents as people who believed different things to me, not people who believed the exact same things but considered themselves much more special and exempt from responsibility than their fellow believers. 

    Gladwell now admits that when he participated in a 2022 discussion on male people participating in women’s sports, “I heard that and thought, ‘This is nuts,’ and yet I didn’t say anything”. He claims to have been “cowed”. I get that. Everyone has something to fear in a world where you can be torn to pieces for simply saying sex matters. But this world only came into being because people who agreed with feminists spent years refusing to say so. We were scared, too, and we would have had far less to be afraid of had we had some support.

    Like many a terf, I have had years of people mistakenly believing that they can “support” me by telling me in private that they agree with me, even if in public they say the opposite. This is not support. While I can empathise with being afraid, all too often the reasons given for “not being able” to speak up rest on the assumption that those of us who do are blessed with some form of inferiority which mitigates the costs. Unlike people who have reputations to protect, friends they don’t wish to offend, concerns about playing into the hands of the far-right, women like me are apparently unimportant, insensitive and politically reckless. It’s only right that we should serve as cannon fodder in the gender wars, clearing the way for the “good” people to breeze in later.

    As recent books such as Hounded, TERF Island and The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht have made clear, the impact of the ‘gender wars’ on those who spoke out has been profound. Even if tomorrow every single person were to say “yes, you were right”, it won’t restore the loss of trust. Because we know that you knew we were right all along. You just didn’t think we mattered enough to say so. Instead of telling us how scared you were, why not think about what this has felt like for us?

    At bottom these people – like Gladwell, like Jon Ronson (mentioned earlier in the article, and a particular bête noire of Graham Linehan) – have shown themselves to be cowards. But it does demonstrate, in extreme form, how strong the pressure is to toe the line, not rock the boat, keep in with the in-crowd.

    In extreme form because, as Gladwell now admits, trans ideology is completely off-the-wall nuts. It requires an extraordinary suspension of critical thinking to believe any of it. Yet here we are…