Author: Mick Hartley

our Leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Here’s what McDonnell tweeted:

‘Throughout discussion of antisemitism it’s always been said criticism of practices of Israeli state is not antisemitic. I don’t believe therefore that this article is or @RLong Bailey should’ve been sacked. I stand in solidarity with her’

Now, McDonnell is not a stupid or ignorant man. On the contrary, he was one of the more intelligent and competent members of the Corbyn shadow cabinet. And what he’s claiming is that those people who object to what Peake said, and to Long-Bailey’s endorsement of it, are really objecting to criticism of Israel. And then he says that it’s agreed (‘always been said’) that criticism of the practices of the Israeli state is not antisemitic. […]

[W]hat’s primarily objectionable about Peake’s remark is not that it amounts to criticism of Israel, but rather that it’s not true. What Peake said, and Long-Bailey praised, is just false. I don’t know if Peake was unaware of the falsehood of this claim when she promulgated it, or if Long-Bailey was likewise unaware when she praised it, but the originator of the claim, whoever it was, will have known it to be false – that is, will have known it to be a lie. A derogatory and prejudicial lie, which rehearses a very old antisemitic trope about Jewish power and cruelty. Peake should perhaps have checked before she circulated it, but she’s an actor, and may have no special interest in finding out the truth about her favoured political causes. Long-Bailey should certainly have checked, since she’s a politician in a senior post in a party which has had problems with antisemitism recently, to put it mildly.

But McDonnell – clever, competent, politically experienced, supposedly principled John McDonnell – shouldn’t even have needed to check. By the time he voiced his solidarity with Long-Bailey, he should have realised that this was a toxic attempt to drag Israel, and Jews, into a dreadful event which they had nothing to do with. Telling lies about Israeli Jews training American police officers how to murder black Americans isn’t criticism of Israel, it’s red-handed antisemitism, guaranteed to discredit the Jewish state and to stir up hostility against those who support it. For McDonnell to pretend that Long-Bailey lost her shadow cabinet job because she criticised Israel is a contemptible piece of sophistry of which he should be thoroughly ashamed.

This essay by Joel Kotkin at Tablet takes a jaundiced look at the "fashionable radicalism" currently on display in the big US cities. It will only, says Kotkin, end badly for the Democrats (in the blue states), as the liberal middle class flees the increasingly chaotic and divided urban centres for a life in the suburbs and less crowded smaller towns and cities.

Worth reading in full, but this is a point worth making about the links between Black Lives Matter and antisemitism: 

Blue state leaders have been slow to recognize—or perhaps slow to acknowledge—that BLM politics are more akin to the Black Panther Party of the 1960s than the Southern Christian Leadership Council. Academic Melina Abdullah, a prominent BLM spokesperson and co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter, is an open admirer of the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan. She describes the protests not as a cry for reform but an “uprising” or “rebellion.” In late May, Abdullah explained: “We’ve been very deliberate in saying that the violence and pain and hurt that’s experienced on a daily basis by Black folks at the hands of a repressive system should also be visited upon, to a degree, to those who think that they can just retreat to white affluence.” Among the areas where rioters visited pain was LA’s traditionally Jewish Fairfax district, where stores were destroyed and synagogues were vandalized and spray-painted with slogans like “Fuck Israel.” A BLM leader in New York has endorsed the armed takeover of neighborhoods, something that has already occurred, with deadly results, in painfully white and hip Seattle.

On the latest from Farrakhan and his hip supporters – and the silent complicity of the left – see Elder of Ziyon here and here.

at to a man and another to a woman as “an outdated concept” that reinforced the “gender binary.” Mr Decaudin persuaded New York Democrats to rewrite the rule in October 2019. The amended rule requires each district to elect to the state committee two people who “do not identify as the same gender.”

Around that time, Mr Decaudin caused a public scandal when he appeared onstage in a tight red dress that emphasized the bulge of his erect male genitalia. He was a speaker at the event, where he discussed the resolution he authored to make the State Committee’s sex-parity rule “inclusive.” In response to backlash surrounding his protruding bulge, Mr Decaudin tweeted: “TERFs and SWERFs and truscum can suck my girld**k.”

And, in Canada – University Associate Chair Fired; Her Belief in Biological Sex Makes Students Feel “Unsafe”:

“The university has said it’s perfectly OK to fire people for doubting that men can get pregnant, for doubting lesbians can have penises. The implications are very dangerous because this is a live issue in our contemporary Canadian democracy,” Kathleen Lowrey stated.

An associate professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, Kathleen Lowrey began a three-year term in 2019 as associate chair of undergraduate programs for the department. On March 24, she received a letter from Lesley Cormack, dean of Arts at the time, informing Dr Lowrey that her appointment as associate chair would conclude July 1, 2020.

No reason for the dismissal was provided, other than an assertion that the professor was “not able to be as effective in this administrative role” and it was “not in the best interests of the students or the University for you to carry on”. 

The dismissal followed meetings with Lowrey, Cormack and the department chair, in which Lowrey had been told there had been informal complaints made to the dean of students and the university’s Office of Safe Disclosure and Human Rights. Because the complaints were informal and anonymous, Dr Lowrey has no other information on the nature of the claims, other than her views on feminism were making students feel unsafe.

As she notes:

If you’ve done something bad to students you’re supposed to have a hearing about it so you can answer what the charges are. If I’ve done something bad they should be able to say what it is. Or it is about my views? Which in that case that’s not so good because that’s really a violation of academic freedom.

Dr Lowrey says her views on feminism can be summarized as follows:

# men cannot get pregnant

# lesbians don’t have penises

# biological sex is real

A controversialist, clearly.

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treatment for children and adolescents. But there is no clear evidence that there is such a thing as ‘gender identity’. The term comes from gender studies and the humanities, not medicine. Gender is merely a stereotype or a social construct.

The problem is that gender here is determined by diagnosing people’s feelings in relation to the clothes they wear and how they conform to rather conservative tropes for what makes a man or a woman. The NHS criteria for determining gender dysphoria relies entirely upon social stereotypes where girls are likeable, boys are assertive, and so on…

Treatment for gender dysphoria starts to look something like gay-conversion therapy. Added to this is the fact that more than 40 clinicians have left the NHS’s GIDS clinic over the past three years alone due to serious concerns over the safeguarding of children in their care.

But there are signs that the tide is turning.

There is some good news, however. Last week, BBC Woman’s Hour reported that much of the language on the NHS website around ‘gender dysphoria’ has been reworded to more accurately reflect science. One major change was that the NHS no longer states that puberty-blockers like Lupron are ‘reversible’ since there are few studies on their long-term physical or psychological effects. What is known from trials of hormone-blockers in sheep is that it ‘is associated with permanent changes in brain development’. For the study’s authors, this ‘raises particular concerns about the cognitive changes associated with the prolonged use of [hormone] treatment in children and adolescents’.

References to trans children committing suicide have also been removed from the NHS website. The threat of suicide was used to frighten parents into submitting their child into harmful treatments. The site no longer equates ‘gender identity’ to having specific interests as a young child – such as wearing ‘typical boys’ or girls’ clothes’, or disliking ‘taking part in typical boys’ or girls’ games and activities’. The NHS also no longer claims that sex can be changed. The new phrasing is as follows: ‘Some people may decide to have surgery to permanently alter body parts associated with their biological sex.’ After years of kowtowing to the gender lobby, for the NHS to even use the term ‘biological sex’ feels revolutionary.

For over a decade the trans lobby has been successful at promoting anti-science hokum as truth. And it has promoted regressive and conservative notions of gender in the process. It’s time to speak up against it.

1983

Macon GA, 1983

Vicksburg MS, 1984

Tutweiller MS, 1986

Armadillo, LA, 1986
[Photos: Baldwin Lee]

e seems to have been a media blackout.

The virus was transported to Wuhan and stored in the Virology Institute there.

So…could this be linked to our current Covid-19 pandemic? Was there in fact a leak from the Virology Institute?

Well….opinions differ. No surprise there. Most experts say that the differences between this coronavirus and Covid-19 – some 4%, apparently – are too great for mutation in this relatively short time frame. But with some laboratory assistance, and manipulation from curious scientists at the Wuhan Virology Institute – which is the kind of work they do – well, who knows?

So, the plot thickens. The WIV have not responded to questions from the Sunday Times about why it failed for months to acknowledge that the closest match to the Covid-19 virus was found in a mine where people had died from a coronavirus-like illness years earlier. 

Overall, then, the chances of a lab leak as the cause of our current pandemic look just a bit more likely now, but we're still a long way from any definitive answers.

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"Bus transportation — loading baggage on motor coach."
[Photos: Shorpy/Harris & Ewing Collection]

And, added bonus from Esther Bubley, Pittsburgh September 1943:

"Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Passengers in the waiting room of the Greyhound bus station."
[Photo: Shorpy/Esther Bubley for the Office of War Information]

pt”>Yet in her tweet sharing the interview, Long-Bailey described Peake as an “absolute diamond”. And the morning after she was fired, members of the Socialist Campaign Group — which brings together Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, and many other left-wing Labour MPs — met Keir Starmer to call for her restoration to the shadow cabinet. According to the group’s official statement, they also made allegations of “electoral sabotage” and insisted on the need for Labour members and MPs to speak out against Israel.

In other words, they responded to a comrade’s censure for endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory by doubling down with more conspiracism and more obsessive focus on the world’s only majority-Jewish state.

That was the same week in which Black Lives Matter UK complained that “mainstream British politics is gagged of the right to critique Zionism”…

For more in a similar vein, see this MEMRI TV clip from a Brooklyn rally this week:

Within Our Lifetime, a NY-based pro-Palestinian organization, organized a "Day of Rage" rally against Israeli plans to annex parts of the West Bank. The event, which was called "No to Annexation," was held in Brooklyn on July 1, 2020, and the video of the event was uploaded to the organizers' Facebook page. During the rally, an activist named Jamie from the pro-North Korea Nodutdol organization told the protestors that Palestine will be liberated, that Korea will be unified, and that the U.S. and its puppet governments will be "no more." Another speaker, Amin Hosain of Decolonize This Place, an anti-gentrification movement, said that the police are the enemy and an impediment to the liberation of Palestine, and he said that when NYPD cop cars burn, a "revolutionary country" is being awakened.

Dequi Kioni Sadiki, wife of former Black Panther Seko Odinga, said that the European Jews who force Palestinians into refugee camps, concentration camps, and killing fields are related to the Europeans who forced Africans into slavery and prison death camps. She added that Palestine must be free like the stolen land of North America, which she referred to as "Turtle Island." A representative of the Puerto Rican New York Borica Resistance movement said that the police, Israel, and the U.S. government must be abolished. Nerdeen Kiswani from Within Our Lifetime said that Palestinians do not only want to return to Gaza and the West Bank, but that they want all of Palestine. Wrapped in a red flag, a man named Rob from the Party for Socialism and Liberation led the crowd in chant in Arabic: "Death to Israel! Death to America!" In addition, the crowd chanted: "Millions of martyrs are marching to Jerusalem!… The gates of Al-Aqsa are made of iron – its gates will only be opened by a martyr… From Gaza to Minnesota, globalize the Intifada!… Black lives matter!… Not just annexation, not just occupation, fight for liberation – bring the whole thing down!" 

The crazies are moving away from their computer screens and out onto the streets.

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Royal Wedding street party, Hampshire

Whitstable Oyster Festival, Kent

Royal Gunpowder Mills VE Weekend, Essex

Arsenal fans at Wembley
[Photos © Orlando Gili]

A touch nostalgic in the present socially distancing circumstances – but we'll get back there.