Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • “Lincoln woman”

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  • In Brussels

    Full text:

    This is what Belgium’s radical pro-Hamas scene looks like today. Not calls for peace, not solidarity with the oppressed—but street theatre glorifying slaughter. A movement that praises terrorism in the open, pressures anyone who speaks out, and treats mass murder as a political identity. I’ve been threatened by this same current for telling the truth about Hamas’s crimes—against Israelis, yes, but also against Palestinians like me.

    They didn’t come to Europe looking for freedom. They came looking for a platform—one where they could spread Hamas’s ideology without paying the price. Where they could chant for more dead civilians, and call it culture. Where they could reenact massacres and get protected by the language of “rights.”

    Europe needs to decide whether it still has red lines. Because when executions are simulated in a public square and no one intervenes, no one condemns, no one draws a line—that’s not free expression. That’s surrender.

  • Antisemitic violence only makes Zionism more appealing

    Atlantic:

    Consider the Holocaust, the greatest anti-Jewish atrocity in modern memory. The Third Reich and its many collaborators exterminated two-thirds of Europe’s Jews. At the same time, the enemies of the Nazis—including the United States and Canada—refused to let most desperate Jewish refugees into their countries. This inevitably funneled many people toward their destination of last resort: mandatory Palestine. The creation of Israel was the consequence less of Jewish choices than of all other Jewish choices being foreclosed by non-Jewish powers.

    In 1948, Israel declared independence and fought off the attempt of five invading Arab armies to strangle it in the cradle. Some 800,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland. Wide swaths of the world promptly took out their displeasure at this outcome on the Jewish populations nearest at hand. In the years following Israel’s founding, nearly 1 million Jews left their ancestral homes in the Arab and Muslim world. Many fled abuse in countries such as Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia, where Jews were imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and stripped of their possessions, despite having lived in these places for millennia. At the time, few of these people were Zionists. They loved their home countries, which refused to love them back, and faced persecution when they arrived in Israel. Today, this Mizrahi community and its descendants comprise about half of Israel’s population and form the backbone of Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing base.

    The Soviet Union, despite presenting itself as the vanguard of universal brotherhood, also turned on its Jews. The Communist police state cast the community as subversive, institutionally discriminated against its members in higher education and the professions, and labeled countless Jews who had no interest in Israel as “Zionists.” The state executed secular Jewish artists and intellectuals under false charges, repressed observance of the Jewish faith, and threw those who protested into Gulags. Eventually, after decades of international pressure, nearly 2 million Jews were allowed to leave. More than half moved to Israel, where they would become one of Israel’s most reliably conservative constituencies.

    Simply put, Israel exists as it does today because of the repeated choices made by societies to reject their Jews. Had these societies made different choices, Jews would still live in them, and Israel likely would not exist—certainly not in its present form. Instead, Israel is a garrison state composed precisely of those Jews with the most reason to distrust the outside world and its appeals to international ideals, knowing that these did precisely nothing to help them when they needed it most. In this manner, decade after decade, anti-Semitism has created more Zionism. Put another way, the unwitting agents of Zionism throughout history have been those unwilling to tolerate Jews in their own countries.

    Even in Athens. Why would Jews put up with this level of threat now that they have their own country?

  • Homophobic conversion therapy wrapped up in rainbow lies

    This is v good.

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  • Yesterday in Athens

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  • Fifth Avenue 1912

    Manhattan ca. 1912. "Fifth Avenue at Forty-Second Street, New York." Looking north. Busy, busy, busy. 

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photos: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

  • Enabling of predatory people

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  • The “Hamas operative” behind the Thunberg flotilla

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    Article here:

    In 2013, Mr Birawi was designated by Israel as a Hamas operative in Europe and is the head of the Europal Forum, which Israel designated as a terrorist organisation in 2021….

    Speaking in the Commons in October 2023, Christian Wakeford, the Labour MP for Bury South, used parliamentary privilege to name 63-year-old Mr Birawi as a Hamas operative living in Barnet, north London.

    “He is listed as a trustee of a UK-registered charity, Education Aid for Palestinians, and publicly available video shows him hosting a 2019 event in London titled Understanding Hamas,” Mr Wakeford told MPs.

  • Palestinian suffering “instrumentalised for a Western morality play”

    g worthwhile to read. They might reflect on the cautionary tale of Vittorio Arrigoni – a story that should linger as a sombre whisper against hubris. In August 2008, Arrigoni arrived in Gaza by boat with the Free Gaza Movement flotilla. During Operation Cast Lead, he became one of the best-known Western voices in Gaza, writing prolifically and immersing himself in the territory’s brutal complexities.

    Yet in his zeal to “stay human”, Arrigoni drifted dangerously close to factions linked to Hamas and other Islamist groups – remaining ideologically blind to the jihadist forces brewing in parallel. His was a worldview intoxicated by its own moral purity, one that refused to see the brutal realities of the actors around him. The consequences were fatal. In April 2011, Arrigoni was abducted by the Salafist group Tawhid wal-Jihad, and hanged by those he thought he understood.

    If Thunberg and co. had been allowed to land, their safety, or their reception as heroes, would have very much in doubt. But they never really expected to land: they expected to be stopped by the IDF. It was all theatre. Nasty Israel, brave heroic Greta.

    The vanity of it all is appalling. It makes a mockery both of Israel’s legitimate security concerns and of the Palestinians themselves, whose plight cannot be alleviated by the conspicuous virtue of foreign celebrities. The Palestinians become a passive backdrop, their suffering instrumentalised for a Western morality play, starring the world’s most famous contemporary white saviour.

  • “Call me naive…”

    elled to speak out.

    I had just assumed the experts crafting guidelines were ensuring that there was a body of evidence supporting the incontrovertible long-term benefits for these extraordinary treatments that were being performed on young people: puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and double mastectomy.

    But you assumed wrong. 

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