Mick Hartley

Blog

  • Cambridge graduation

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  • The Nazi obsession

    It's a one-way street: hating Israel = hating Jews, and then come the one-armed salutes and the talk of a Final Solution….

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  • UN “transparently antisemitic”

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    Full text:

    Google co-founder and longtime pillar of the company, Sergey Brin, has called the United Nations “transparently antisemitic” after a new U.N. report accused tech firms, including Google, of profiting from Israel’s supposed “genocide” in Gaza.

    The claim comes despite the International Court of Justice finding no evidence that genocide is taking place.

    The report was authored by Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on Palestine, who has been repeatedly condemned for antisemitic rhetoric. The U.S. has formally called for her removal.

    Brin, whose Jewish family fled Soviet antisemitism, responded in an internal Google forum:

    “I would be careful citing transparently antisemitic organizations like the UN.”

    This is a rare but pointed intervention from Brin, and a major rebuke of the U.N.’s ongoing moral and factual collapse on Israel.

    I would’ve urged anti-Israel people to boycott Google, but I doubt they do any research for themselves so…

  • Anti-Zionism as antisemitism

    conspirators, denying Jewish peoplehood, and cloaking antisemitic narratives in the language of anti-racism. The USSR didn't merely denounce Zionism; it enshrined conspiratorial, demonological anti-Zionism as state dogma, meticulously refined in KGB laboratories and exported worldwide like ideological contraband. Moscow even assembled the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, staffed with decorated Jewish veterans and literary figures, to lend a kosher seal to this antisemitic propaganda. These Soviet ideas seeded themselves in Western intellectual circles, where they continue to echo today on college campuses, in activist slogans, and in popular discourse.

    Here's a glaring—and tragic—irony: Gessen, a Jew who, like me, fled the Soviet Union, has admirably made a career unmasking Putin's despotism and yet is blind to how the very methods they rightly condemn in Putin's Russia were perfected by the Soviet anti-Zionist machine of which Putin himself was once an eager apparatchik.

    But don't take my word for it: ask the vanished Jewish communities from Baghdad to Cairo to Damascus whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Jews of every background—Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Bukharian, and beyond—have borne the brunt of anti-Zionism's violent consequences. Before 1948, Baghdad was over a quarter Jewish—today, the community is a ghost. Egypt's 75,000 Jews have dwindled to a handful of souls. The same macabre story unfolds wherever anti-Zionism has triumphed, from Poland to Syria to Tunisia to the Soviet Union: harassment, dispossession, and sanctioned terror—enacted with the righteous zeal reserved for those convinced they stand on the side of virtue.

    So yes, we do need a new understanding of antisemitism—one that doesn't cast Jews as paranoid, traumatized, hysterical, terrified, and incapable of understanding their own history. One that recognizes anti-Zionism not on the terms of its own conceit, but as the engine of discrimination, disenfranchisement, dispossession, displacement, and violence against Jews it has always been—up to and including today.

    If you don't know, the Livingstone Formulation (third paragraph), named after our former London mayor, is a term coined by David Hirsh after Livingstone's remark that "the accusation of antisemitism has been used against anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government". Ken was a notable Corbyn ally, suspended from the Labour Party after his claim that Hitler "was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews".

  • Misremembering 7/7

    we should rethink our global stance – not because it is wrong, but because it might provoke attacks.

    This was of course the standard line at the time on the left: 7/7 was a response – understandable but perhaps a little de trop – to UK foreign policy, from overthrowing Saddam Hussein to support for Israel. With someone of Basu's views in charge, no wonder our counter-terrorism strategy hasn't been quite the rip-roaring success we'd been hoping for.

    This is a dangerous argument. The proper response to terrorism is to stand strong, not to shy away from standing with democratic allies like Israel which are fighting jihadism themselves. It is to face down the extremists, at home and abroad, with clarity, courage and resolve. Terrorism isn’t caused by our values or our alliances. It’s caused by the people who choose to murder in the name of jihad.

  • A symbolic participation in the Hamas pogrom

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  • Confronting the usual terrorist propaganda

    Following on from Monday's Natasha Hausdorff post:

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  • Man as Labour’s women’s officer

    ffield1/status/1942721809687687344?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>July 8, 2025

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    Article here.

    The Trans Rights Alliance has put forward Steph Richards, a transgender woman in possession of a gender recognition certificate, as its candidate for women’s officer.

    In a post on X, Labour LGB said: “Many people say that trans ideology is a men’s rights movement.

    “The ‘Trans Alliance’ (seeking to take over the once-great LGBT+ Labour) has set out to prove this. Also breaking party rules by putting a man forward to be women’s officer.”

  • MP’s Holocaust inversion

    Elsewhere in the JC:

    An independent pro-Gaza MP has been roundly condemned for appearing to suggest that Israel is planning to create “gas chambers” for Palestinians.

    On Monday night, Blackburn MP Adnan Hussain shared an image of a story from Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz had instructed the IDF to prepare plans to “concentrate” the entire population of Gaza in a new “humanitarian city” in Rafah.

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    Lovely. They can never resist a chance to throw the Holocaust back at the Jews.

  • The former BBC diversity manager

    o the contrary. Not all Jews are Zionists. Not all Zionists are Jews. Calling Jews who oppose Zionism, who oppose the genocide, antisemites, is pathetic.”

    That's maybe not quite the rebuttal she seems to think. No doubt calling Zionism "a white supremacist, colonial rightwing political ideology" will have met with nods of approval in the BBC boardrooms, but doesn't work so well for the rest of us. In fact it rather confirms the JC accusations….

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