Mick Hartley

Blog

  • The Qatari influence

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    Qatar are the (not so) hidden force now behind Hamas, as Iranian influence fades. It's where the billionaire Hamas leaders live in luxury – or used to before Israel started targeting them – while encouraging the people of Gaza to sacrifice themselves in the name of jihad against the Zionist entity.

    Still, not to worry. They've just gifted Donald Trump a lovely plane for his personal use. It would, says Trump, be "stupid" not to accept.

  • Going through the looking-glass over Israel

    ong to what he was saying? For some of his vile lines are what British Jews are now hearing as a matter of unexceptional routine.

    The play deals with the furore in 1983 after Dahl published a savage article in the Literary Review about Israel’s war in Lebanon. “Never before in the history of man,” he wrote, “has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers.”

    That’s precisely the vicious claim that has caused many British Jews today to feel that their country has turned into a nightmarish alternative universe. After the Hamas-led atrocities against Israelis on October 7, 2023, many switched rapidly from pitying the victims of genocidal aggression to portraying them as barbarous murderers for defending themselves against it.

    In the play, the publisher Tom Maschler presents Dahl’s grotesque antisemitism as moral because it’s wrapped up in compassion for the Palestinians. That’s precisely the gaslighting to which British Jews are today being subjected.

    Given the extraordinary explosion of Jew hatred in the UK since the October 7th massacre, it's highly likely that there are many who not only sympathise with Dahl, but who agree with him.

    In the play, Dahl says he’s antisemitic because there are Jews in England who support Zionism. The suggestion is that they therefore deserve to be loathed. Did the audience quietly agree? Given how so many appear to have gone through the looking-glass over Israel, this sickening possibility was no theatrical illusion. It was all too likely to be true.

  • The British Council award

    ic correspondent who previously praised the “exquisite journalism” of a Holocaust revisionist has been named as one of the winners at the British Council’s Study UK Alumni Awards.

    Layla Bashar Al-Kloub, a senior journalist at the public broadcaster, has also previously condemned the “Zionist entity”, labelled Israel as “terrorists”, and called the suspected killer of an Israeli rabbi a “martyr”.

    Pretty much par for the course at BBC Arabic. 

    Al-Kloub was named the 2025 Jordan Winner of the Culture and Creativity Award for her “remarkable contributions” to “storytelling and cultural engagement”.

    But, in a series of exposés published by the JC over recent years, it was revealed that Al-Kloub has a long history of expressing anti-Israel sentiment online.

    In May 2021, the reporter posted a gushing tribute on X for television journalist Muna Hawwa, a Palestinian activist suspended by Al Jazeera for producing a 2019 video that asked: “How true is the #Holocaust and how did the Zionists benefit from it?”

    In her message hailing the Palestinian activist’s return to X, Al-Kloub wrote: “My dear Muna… there was a great victory for you, yourself specifically, the victory of the free word, and the victory of exquisite journalism, you have proved everybody you are capable of confronting large institutions by yourself, may Allah strengthen you.”

    In the documentary, Hawwa also said: “Israel is the biggest winner from the Holocaust, and it uses the same Nazi justifications as a launching pad for racial cleansing and annihilation of the Palestinians… The ideology behind ‘the State of Israel’ is based on religious, national, and geographic concepts that suckled from the Nazi spirit.”

    Exquisite journalism indeed.

    A spokesperson for the British Council said: “An investigation into concerns that were raised about a national finalist in Jordan found insufficient evidence that would overturn the original decision.

    “A review by an independent panel confirmed that Layla Al-Kloub was the strongest candidate overall for the Culture and Creativity award in Jordan, which recognises individuals who can demonstrate their influence and creativity through their work in arts and culture. We congratulate all our Jordan winners on their awards.

    “The British Council operates in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and we are committed to ensuring that everyone we work with around the world feels respected and treated with dignity.”

  • Woman’s Hour

    BBC Woman's Hour is starting, from today, to hear "different perspectives on the recent Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman under the Equality Act. We’ll look at the practical questions it raises for organisations, businesses and individuals". First up today, in keeping with its proud tradition of prioritising men at every opportunity, is trans-identified male Robin Moira White. 

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  • Selective empathy and historical blindness

    -left: 40px”>The final insult is the historical amnesia: a lecture on “ethnic cleansing” delivered without a word on the Jewish expulsions from Arab lands, or on Hamas’s founding charter. No nuance there, oddly.

    So let’s be clear. You can criticise Israeli policy — many Israelis do. But this isn’t journalism, it’s a sanctimonious sermon soaked in selective empathy and historical blindness.

  • Banning the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

    ­allied military personnel have been killed by its operations. Dozens of Iranian exiles, seen as enemies of the state, have been hunted down. Using local criminals and paid assassins, the IRGC has tried to silence Iranian journalists abroad, including in London, and intimidate those exposing the corruption within the heart of the IRGC itself.

    The argument has always been that by banning the IRGC, Britain would lose any influence it had in Tehran – which is laughable. It's the same fantasy that drove Obama's misbegotten rapprochement with Iran – a rapprochement which was entirely one-sided, given that Tehran has never stopped proclaiming, loudly and clearly, that its hatred of the west is theologically driven, is absolute, and is unchangeable, while its chief foreign policy goal is the destruction of Israel. 

    Also, the IRGC, like the Iranian regime as a whole, is not going through a good period. They're suffering. We need to push against them rather than appease.

    Despite bellicose threats of revenge, the IRGC had little response to the killing of Soleimani. It could not defend Hezbollah, its proxy in Lebanon, when it was all but ­destroyed by Israeli attacks. Its presence in Syria has crumbled since the ousting of President ­Assad. And it cannot suppress the jostling for power among would-be successors to the ailing Khamenei. Britain still has an embassy in Tehran and the limited ability to monitor events. It would make little difference if this was shut in response to a ban on the IRGC operating in Britain.

    The evidence is plentiful, the plotting unacceptable and the risk of espionage and terrorism too great to ignore.

  • Payback for the Supreme Court judgment

    f MPs get their way, people could soon be entitled to possess an officially sanctioned app that falsifies their sex. The proposal effectively introduces a form of self-ID in this country, flying in the face of last month’s Supreme Court judgment emphatically stating the primacy of sex over gender.

    Today, peers will make a last-ditch attempt to prevent this challenge to the ruling when the Government’s Data (Use and Access) bill returns to the House of Lords. If the bill becomes law in its present form, anyone will be able to apply for a digital ID endorsed with a government “trustmark”. That’s supposed to ensure that the data it contains, including sex, is accurate. But the app will say nothing about the source of the data, which could be based on documents that state someone’s gender identity rather than their sex.

    Anyone can get a passport or driving licence that wrongly records their sex — and it won’t be clear that the sex marker on their digital ID is equally inaccurate. It’s estimated that tens of thousands of people in the UK have official documents that reflect their gender identity rather than their biological sex, including passports and driving licences. Last week a Conservative MP, Dr Ben Spencer, proposed an amendment that would have ensured that only reliable documents such as birth certificates could be used to create a digital ID. He pointed out that the Supreme Court has made it clear that public bodies must collect data on biological sex to comply with the 2010 Equality Act. “The new clause ensures that this data is recorded and used correctly in accordance with the law,” he said.

    Some MPs responded with the kind of emotive language that’s become a familiar tactic of trans activists. Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Greens, crowed on X that the “transphobic amendment” had been defeated by 363 votes to 93. “It would have forced trans people to out themselves virtually daily, putting people’s safety and dignity at risk,” she claimed. Labour MP Stella Creasy condemned the amendment as “a targeting of the trans community which is deeply regressive”.

    It’s hard not to see the outcome as payback for the Supreme Court judgment. The innocent-sounding data bill has provided gender warriors with an opportunity to circumvent the ruling, and they’ve seized it with both hands. Some MPs have even argued that expecting individuals to be honest about their sex would breach their privacy, as though deceiving other people is a human right.

    The House of Lords will no doubt provide some robust opposition. I wonder how many like me, who once regarded the Lords as a relic of a previous age best done away with, have recently come to a deeper appreciation of its importance as a bulwark against the tyranny of the Commons.

    Ministers aren’t listening. Neither are most MPs, confirming the widely-held suspicion that the House of Commons is packed with true believers in gender identity. The battle to record sex accurately isn’t over, but no one can say they weren’t warned.

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  • Down to Docklands

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    View from Rotherhithe.

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    With cruise ship.

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    Bascule bridge at Surrey Quays.

  • Karen’s story

    ch this promo of Karen's story, especially for the 'but Rose is a woman' line at the end.

    Her story is breaking in the Mail on Sunday, please pray for and support Karen and all of the Darlington nurses.

    Find out more in the Mail and on our website:

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  • How “non-binary” reinforces sexism

    The embrace of gender has led, predictably enough, to an increased stress on sex stereotypes – as exemplified by the latest Met Gala, where men are men, and women, especially, very much dress and present themselves as pornified fashion objects. Those who feel they can't match these fantasy visions of masculinity and femininity, as a result, now call themselves non-binary. It's back to the old sexism, but in new progressive clothes. 

    Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times today:

    On the flight home, I listened to Louis Theroux’s interview with Bella Ramsey, a 21-year-old actress. She identifies as non-binary, which means in every interview she gives she has to describe what that is, because no one really knows. Ramsey acknowledged to Theroux that sexism exists, saying that gender-neutral awards wouldn’t work, because women would never win again. But she couldn’t acknowledge that it’s exactly the same prejudice that makes her describe herself as non-binary. “I always felt more masculine,” she said. So because she doesn’t feel feminine, she’s not a woman. That is her conclusion. But another word for equating women with femininity is, quite simply, sexism….

    Once artists rebelled against old-fashioned ideas about masculinity and femininity, like Boy George, KD Lang and Madonna. Now those who don’t fit into today’s Kardashianised mould of celebrity beauty, such as Ramsey, Sam Smith, Emma Corrin and so on, describe themselves as “non-binary”, as if not having pumped-up breasts or biceps de-sexes them. The irony of the “non-binary” term is it reinforces today’s binary ideas about how women and men should look and behave….

    The left has been notoriously bad at dealing with gender theory, preferring to see it as the vanguard of progressivism rather than the sexist backlash it clearly is. Ramsey’s co-star in HBO’s zombie drama The Last of Us, Pedro Pascal, exemplifies that sexism. He protested against the UK Supreme Court’s recent clarification that “woman” in the Equality Act means an actual woman, not a trans one, by wearing a T-shirt with the trans rights slogan “Protect the dolls”. Because that’s what the perfect woman is now: a doll, fragile and fake. It will probably be the theme at next year’s Met Gala.

    It used to be straightforward back in the heady days of women's lib and gay lib: cast aside the sex stereotypes and live as you want to live. Men can knit and cook and do the dishes; women can put up a shelf and play football. Now…well, whoever does the dishes is a woman, and if you play with cars you must be a man.

    Thanks very much to all those sex-as-a-social-construct theorists. Somewhere down the line the postmodern account, with America leading the way, escaped the academy and infested the world…

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