Author: Mick Hartley

Bank accounts, you say? https://t.co/S3NZxheyxX pic.twitter.com/SX1GchAfyV

— habibi (@habibi_uk) July 26, 2025

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

From a thread with video evidence of Hamas stealing UN trucks of aid in Gaza:

pic.twitter.com/iJskSFauDj

— Kosher🎗 (@koshercockney) July 25, 2025

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

pic.twitter.com/VvdKpKh6hz

— Kosher🎗 (@koshercockney) July 25, 2025

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

It's the women here. Some of the videos have trouble loading.

/www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html” rel=””>I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” Omer Bartov accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. As a professor of genocide studies, he should know better. Genocide is not defined by a few comments taken out of context, by estimates of casualties or destruction, or by how war looks in headlines or on social media. It is defined by specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. That is a high legal bar. Bartov did not meet it. He did not even try.

I am not a lawyer or a political activist. I am a war expert. I have led soldiers in combat. I have trained military units in urban warfare for decades and studied and taught military history, strategy, and the laws of war for years. Since October 7, I have been to Gaza four times embedded with the Israel Defense Forces. I have interviewed the Prime Minister of Israel, the Defense Minister, the IDF Chief of Staff, Southern Command leadership, and dozens of commanders and soldiers on the front lines. I have reviewed their orders, watched their targeting process, and seen soldiers take real risks to avoid harming civilians. Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent….

Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets, and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby. I have seen Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed.

Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime. More than 94,000 trucks carrying over 1.8 million tons of aid have entered the territory. Israel has supported hospitals, repaired water pipelines, increased access to clean water, and enabled over 36,000 patients to leave Gaza for treatment abroad….

Bartov cites death tolls from Hamas health authorities without question. He says 58,000 have been killed, including 17,000 children. But these numbers come from a terrorist organization. They mix civilians and fighters and count anyone under 18 as a child, even though Hamas uses teenagers and younger children as combatants. The figures are not independently verified and have been shown to contain false details, including names, ages, and sex. Civilian deaths are tragic, but in Gaza, they are also part of Hamas’s strategy.

No military operation is judged solely by body counts or destruction figures. If we used Bartov’s logic, every major war would be called genocide. Two million civilians died in the Korean War, an average of 54,000 per month. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars killed hundreds of thousands. The fight against ISIS leveled multiple cities and killed tens of thousands. None of those wars were considered genocidal. Gaza is not either. War is evaluated based on the actions of commanders, the goals set by leaders, and how well the military follows the laws of war, not by statistics taken out of context….

This is not a campaign of extermination. It is a war against Hamas, a terrorist army embedded in civilian areas by design.

But different rules apply when Israel's involved.

oying thing: it is blindingly obvious you are turning yourself inside out to avoid noticing trans women are men, trans men are women etc simply because you are…

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) July 26, 2025

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

"Last thing on the cowardice of (vast majority of) the philosophy profession about sex and gender. Possibly the most annoying thing: it is blindingly obvious you are turning yourself inside out to avoid noticing trans women are men, trans men are women etc simply because you are frightened of offending those students/ that colleague/ that daughter/ that friend. You are so frightened of this, you are prepared to advocate for ludicrously byzantine and impenetrable theories in public rather than go with the most simple, elegantly explanatory, and adequately predictive one, that most of the rest of the world can easily see is true. This may make you a good person (?) but it really does make you a terrible philosopher."

Yes but…surely a lot of these philosophers actually enjoy advocating for a theory that most people can see is nonsense. It marks them out as special: as capable of navigating the impenetrable byzantine jargon that they've spent their academic careers mastering. They're arrogant. They're so much smarter than the average Joe. 

The St. Johns River ca. 1910. "Lunch hour on the levee — Jacksonville, Florida."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

Walthamstow Wetlands this morning:

n transactivist delusions than ever. But this week, tantalisingly, I discerned signs of imminent collapse. The Scottish media appears gripped by the Sandy Peggie tribunal, with daily revelations of unsympathetic NHS managers defending the presence of a male doctor in the nurses’ female-only changing room. One newspaper even referred to the man at the heart of the case as “he”. Down south, the NHS has announced the terms of reference for a rapid investigation into a Brighton GP practice that prescribed puberty blockers to minors, and it sounds like it is not messing about. And in academia, Oxford philosophers Daniel Kodsi and John Maier just published an excoriating takedown of the Yale philosophy department’s own attempt to prop up child transition.

[See here for that excoriating takedown.]

Even during my most depressed phases in academia, I knew that these people were taking a big risk — albeit one they apparently didn’t notice. The higher they flew in daring reconstructions of familiar concepts, the further there was to fall, should their central proposition be later rejected. And surely it eventually would be. For “woman” and “man” are categories associated with distinctive visual appearances, and the adaptive capacity to discern the difference between them has been honed over millennia. Sometimes you just know you are looking at a man, despite what the people with the fancy titles are telling you. Indeed, it is a testament to the awesome chutzpah of the latter that they ever thought they could persuade people otherwise.

The risk for them, to be clear, was not merely that they would be proved wrong, a common enough occurrence in philosophy; but that they would be revealed as quite thick. If trans women are women, then not only are there surprisingly high numbers of children in the wrong bodies, women rapists, and mediocre female athletes etc, but those far-sighted philosophers making the case are bravely speaking truth to power. If trans women are in fact men, and have been all along, then the only major revelation is just how many gullible idiots have got into prestigious positions in academic philosophy.

It's perhaps not so much the bright young philosophers themselves as the gullible idiots, but more the people who enabled them. Chancers are chancers.

It just so happens that the arrival of gender ideology, coming out of Queer Theory, coming out of post-modernism as an American take on the French deconstructionists like Derrida, Foucault etc., provided the perfect opportunity for the rise of obscurantism in the service of ambitious young would-be intellectuals to make their mark with their intoxicating blend of impenetrable jargon and "progressive" arrogance. But with gender theory this advanced level of intellectual posing suddenly had real world consequences, as men started playing in women's sport, women could be rapists, lesbians were transphobic for not wanting to have sex with men, and so – endlessly – on. And then people outside of the philosophical academic bubble noticed that this was, in fact, complete nonsense. We were being conned. Or gaslighted, as we say now. And the arrogant young philosophers were left, suddenly, exposed as charlatans. As buffoons.

And all the people who quietly or not so quietly went along with this are now being revealed as the gullible idiots.

A view from India on the disastrous betrayal of medical ethics in the West that came with the gender cult. Janhavi Nilekani:

In the spring of 2022, a 50-year-old grandfather in North Carolina decided that he wanted his daughter’s newborn to suckle at his nipple.

Rather than keep this thought to himself, he opted to confide in his doctor.

You may wonder what happened next. Was the doctor a mandated reporter? Did Child Protective Services show up at his house to investigate a possibility of child sexual abuse? After all, the CPS is so vigilant that they investigate 37% of American children. Or perhaps he was referred to a therapist?

Well, no. Because this particular man identified as a transgender woman, doctors and academics from Duke University wholeheartedly supported his “unique desire”. Indeed, they published a research paper in Breastfeeding Medicine, providing details of the cocktail of hormones and drugs they used. With these, he was able to produce secretions, that were administered to his grandchild. The paper does not have a single sentence about the potential impact on the grandchild.

It is an unimaginable breach of ethics….

Worth a read. 

From the Daily NK:

North Korean authorities are doing everything they can to stop the spread of South Korean pop culture, or hallyu, but young people keep using South Korean expressions and speech patterns anyway.

Article 41 of North Korea’s Youth Education Guarantee Act, passed in 2021, forbids young people from speaking or writing “in odd speech patterns that are not our own.” While North Korea has legally banned youth from using “non-socialist” language, South Korean speech patterns are quietly spreading among young people regardless.

According to a Daily NK source in North Hamgyong province recently, four people in their twenties were arrested in Chongjin by local state security officers for talking like South Koreans. A local resident had tipped off authorities after spotting the group mimicking lines from South Korean films and dramas.

The four are currently being questioned at the city’s Ministry of State Security branch and will likely face six months to a year of forced labor.

“These days, young people are careful to avoid South Korean speech during official activities because they know about the crackdowns, but when they’re with friends, they use it without hesitation—mimicking lines from South Korean movies and shows,” the source said. “They copy the patterns quite naturally, probably because they’ve grown up watching this content.”

When young people hang out together, they freely use South Korean expressions like jagiya (honey), oppa (elder brother, used affectionately by women), daebak (awesome), and jjokpallinda (embarrassed).

This might be their way of mocking North Korean society, where constant surveillance and informing on each other have become normal. North Korean youth embrace South Korean speech patterns, adapting what they hear in films and dramas while laughing and smiling as they do it, the source explained.

Sounds good to me.

re must centre on the return of the hostages and the welfare and wishes of Gaza’s people, not force them into another tragedy.

Currently, saving lives and reducing suffering are the top priorities. No child in Gaza should be dying of hunger when food is available just a few miles away, sitting on a pallet or locked in a warehouse. This is a solvable problem, provided there is political will. Gazans are not starving due to drought or fate; they are starving because humans, both their own leaders and the international community, have failed them. Whilst Israel has no legal obligation to provide aid that will be repurposed by their enemy, stepping up and ending the failure of others should be a moral duty.