Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • The academic hounding of gender-criticals

    Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) July 2, 2025

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    The point is not the harms to us, personally – I for one am very glad I ended up on the right side of history, when the wrong side was sterilising minors and chopping sexual organs out, putting sex-offending men in women's prisons, and pushing women athletes out of competition. The point is the effect of this intensely hostile environment – the research dropped, the talks not given, the lips bitten and the things not said. With Office for Student's new guidance in place, let's hope these poisonous tactics get rooted out of our research institutions, along with (eventually) the senior academics who instigated and facilitated them.

  • UPenn to ban men from women’s sport

    ould now hold the records under current eligibility guidelines", but it did not say whether Thomas' records would be erased.

    Thomas became the first trans athlete to win the highest US national college title in March 2022.

    The deal marks the latest development in President Donald Trump's crackdown on transgender athletes participating in sports. He signed an executive order days after coming into office that sought to prevent transgender women from competing in female categories of sports.

    The university was among several that his administration opened investigations into over possible violations of Title IX, a 1972 civil rights law that bans sex-based discrimination in any education programme or activity that receives federal funding.

    Two months later, the Trump administration paused $175m (£127m) in federal funding to the college over its transgender athlete policy.

    Under Tuesday's deal, the university must stick to "biology-based definitions" of male and female, in line with the president's executive orders, said the education department.

    The headline is misleading in a typical BBC slant. Athletes like Lia Thomas aren't being banned just because they're transgender, but because they're men unfairly competing against women  – where they have a huge physical advantage. That's the problem, and that's why anyone not blinded by trans ideology can clearly see how outrageous this whole farce has been. If it took Trump to end it, well….good for Trump.

  • Hamas and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation

    %20prepare%20for%20next%20Iran%20war%20%2A%20Eisenkot%2C%20Kahana%20leave%20Gantz%20s%20National%20Unity%20party&utm_campaign=July%201%2C%202025″>Jerusalem Post:

    Gazans present at humanitarian aid distribution sites testified that Hamas carries out acts of terror, propaganda, and psychological manipulation against civilians at aid sites, COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories) said on Tuesday.

    The audio recordings released by COGAT reveal that Hamas seeks to disrupt the distribution of food packages at the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid distribution sites.

    Gazans say that Hamas fires at residents near aid distribution sites and spreads false claims about IDF fire, as well as publishes "fabricated data about large numbers of casualties," through fake footage, COGAT said.

    The GHF disclosed on Monday that Hamas had placed bounties on American security workers in the enclave, and that 12 of the organization's local staff members had been murdered by Hamas.

    “Hamas has placed bounties on both our American security personnel and Palestinian aid workers, offering cash rewards to anyone who injures or kills them,” the GHF statement said.

    The aid organization acknowledged the reports that the Hamas terror group has been targeting its personnel, staff, and aid workers.

    It announced that 12 of its local staff have been murdered, and others have been tortured.

    Well this is a huge surprise.

    No doubt the BBC will be covering the story very shortly….

  • Stephen Ireland and Pride in Surrey

    href=”https://twitter.com/VictoriaPeckham/status/1940048514953695515?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>July 1, 2025

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    Jill Foster's Telegraph article here:

    Surrey County Council has, according to a Freedom of Information request, funded Pride in Surrey to the tune of more than £140,000 for various events and projects since 2020, including £24,275 for the year 2024-2025. Earlier this month, weeks after Ireland’s conviction, Guildford Borough Council announced that “Surrey Pride will be returning to Guildford” for a parade in September – the sixth annual Pride event in Surrey, and the second time it has taken place in Guildford. It included a hyperlink to the website of Pride in Surrey.

    The decision astonished those who had been trying to raise the alarm.

    “I contacted Guildford Borough Council after the news about him being arrested and about the level of charges, and they didn’t want to listen,” says Harding.

    “I emailed Zöe Franklin [Lib Dem MP for Guildford] and Julia McShane [Lib Dem leader of the council] asking how they could let this event go ahead. Again, I got a very bland reply from Zöe that what was happening in court had nothing to do with the current Pride in Surrey.

    “It was like they were rubbing salt in the wound, allowing them to have a Pride in Guildford again this year. There’s an awful lot of bad feeling within the community in Guildford and those of us who are Guildford Borough Council taxpayers are thinking: ‘What are you doing?’”

    Franklin and McShane say they were not aware of any concerns about Ireland before his arrest.

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    Very similar dynamic to Jimmy Savile, strikes me.

  • Cowardice and fear

    Why are so many institutions, from the NHS on down, doing their best to ignore the Supreme Court's unequivocal ruling on single-sex spaces? Jo Bartosch:

    What’s behind the mass law breaking isn’t confusion, it’s cowardice and fear. For over a decade, trans ideology has festered in internal staff networks and been funnelled into institutions by external training providers. Backpeddling is not only humiliating for the well-meaning dullards who ushered these changes in, it’s potentially explosive in workplaces where grievance-hoarding zealots have been allowed to dictate policy for years.

    These same activists genuinely believe that being contradicted by reality is discrimination. In such a climate, following the law requires a backbone….

    And there, in a nutshell, is the problem.

  • Crowds

    e they not reminiscent of the crowds that filled marching squares and beer halls not that many years ago? I say no more than “reminiscent”. I don’t claim that Glastonbury is Munich. And I don’t even say that what crowds will sing about euphorically one day, they will put into murderous effect the next. But music and crowds are a lethal mix, carrying us away, taking us out of our shivering individual selves into the warm arms of comrades who feel and believe as we do. Sacha Baron Cohen’s endearingly racist Borat famously persuaded a group of drinkers in an Arizona bar to join him in singing “Throw the Jews down the well”. For all the bemused discomfort some of the drinkers clearly felt, they were unable to resist Borat’s appeal. Who wants to be a party pooper? History teaches that the impulse toward individuation was a long time coming; it further teaches that it takes no time at all for that impulse to go into reverse.

    Jacobson draws some comfort from the theatre, where the power of art – we hope – overrides the power of the crowd.

    In fact, there is a marvellous play on in London at present — Giant, in which the Jew-obsessed children’s writer Roald Dahl is given enough rope to hang himself 10 times over and manages it even more than that without trying. He delivers far more bitter diatribes against Israel than Bob Vylan and Kneecap manage because he has more words. What makes the play art as opposed to propaganda is its dramatic form, questioning, testing, playing this off against that, weighing all that’s said in the light of the speakers’ psychic compulsion to say it. When Dahl’s self-destruction reaches its apotheosis in a riff of violent Jew mania that makes the Glastonbury lot sound like kindergarten name-callers, the audience audibly gasps. Gasps.

    I take great comfort from that gasp. Somewhere, what is shocking still shocks. Somewhere, the individual heart still refuses the blandishments of the mob. Unfortunately, terrifyingly, that somewhere isn’t Glastonbury.

    Yes, but the theatre is not always such a beacon of the individual conscience against the power of the mob. Take for instance Caryl Churchill's deeply unpleasant little diatribe Seven Jewish Children, which Jacobson himself so eloquently demolished….

  • Elsewhere at Glastonbury

    p style=”padding-left: 40px”>He concluded by urging for “a clear anti-capitalist revolutionary struggle”.

    Elsewhere, a panel hosted by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) brought together the group’s director Ben Jamal, The Crown actor Khalid Abdalla, Guardian columnist Owen Jones and climate activist Tori Tsui.

    Jones launched a furious attack on the British establishment, claiming: “Every day, every war crime under the sun is committed in full view of the world and our media gaslight us and our politicians continue to arm that state.”

    He said he believed “passionately” that the legitimacy of “our elite” was over, and predicted their fall from grace. “We have to sweep them away. You cannot be complicit in a genocide and expect your reputation, your career or, in many cases, your freedom to remain.”…

    Once an outspoken member of the Labour Party, Jones turned on his former political home, describing it as run by “soulless ghouls” and claiming that Sir Keir Starmer was “more dishonest than Boris Johnson”.

    He went on: “We’re going through the biggest assault on free speech since the height of McCarthyism.”

    In an hour-long appearance, Jones accused Israel of having detonated “about six Hiroshima bombs worth of explosions” on Gaza. He declared: “No crime in history has been so documented as it happened.”

    He labelled Palestinians in Israeli prisons as “hostages” and alleged that Israeli forces were committing “industrial scale rape”.

    “How depraved would you have to be to be supporting this?” he asked.

    How depraved would you have to be to come out with this shit? And how obsessively Jew-hating?

    At another festival event, Palestine Pulse performed “Grandchildren of the Nakba”, during which Palestinian flags and keffiyehs were distributed for free.

    Meanwhile, a quieter event titled “Action for Hope from Israel and Palestine” drew a small audience of around 20 people. The session featured Palestinian peace activist Hamze Awawde and Israeli social justice campaigner Rona Lotan, who both spoke about the need to end the war in Gaza and build bridges for peace.

    Peace? Who cares about peace when there's Jew-hatred to be stirred up?

    Young people going on about the "anti-capitalist revolutionary struggle” is part of the generational landscape, but when it gets mixed up with a fixation on Israel and the Jews it gets very ugly very quickly.

    Bob Vylan and Kneecap were just the tip of a nasty iceberg.

  • A pattern

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    Story at Reduxx.

    Added:

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  • Trinity Buoy Wharf and City Island

    Where the Lea joins the Thames, this morning:

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  • Reporting from Gaza

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