Author: Mick Hartley

ft: 40px”>I am a transdisciplinary geographer focused on inhuman geographies. I understand the inhuman as a place from which to think about earthly relations and inhumane histories. Theoretically, I engage historical, geophilosophical and black feminist methods to speak to issues of environmental change, empires of geologic practices and the politics of planetary states.

Interesting how Hamas's banner doesn't say "Palestinians will win," but "Nazi Zionism will not win."

Hamas doesn't seek peace or
Palestinian freedom. Their goal is to destroy Israel and kill every Jew.

I repeat: Hamas does NOT want a two-state solution.

They want us dead. pic.twitter.com/k5m1xUqW16

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) February 1, 2025

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And it's in English. Aimed at all their lovely supporters in the West. They know how much the Hamasniks love that Nazi Zionism link. 

The Hamas rituals accompanying the hostage releases have been grotesque exercises in ultra-male fascist ceremonial – but so many still claim they're the victims, they're the heroes. Because….well, because Israel; because Jews.

From the NYT (via) – After being lured to Pakistan, Hira Anwar was fatally shot by her father and an uncle over online posts that her parents believed were immodest, the police said:

Hira Anwar, 14, lived in two contrasting worlds in New York, where she was born and raised. Outside her home, she was a typical American teenager, laughing with friends, posting videos on TikTok and dreaming of a boundless future.

Inside the home, her reality was very different. Her parents, Pakistani immigrants who had settled in the United States over two decades ago, expected her to adhere to their cultural and religious values, which demanded modesty from women.

She didn't adhere to their values, so they killed her.

Hira was fatally shot by her father and an uncle on Monday night, several days after arriving in Pakistan on what she had been told was a family vacation, the police said. The authorities called her death an “honor killing.”

In a chilling confession in Quetta, the capital of the southwestern province of Balochistan, Hira’s father, Anwar ul-Haq, said she had brought shame to the family by posting what he called inappropriate videos online, the police said.

July 1913. "The heart of Detroit." Including, from the left, Fort Street, the twin towers of the Dime Savings Bank, City Hall, the Majestic Building at the corner of Michigan and Woodward Avenues, the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, and the Detroit Opera House.

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Co.]

>"She said that Israel is committing a genocide," Kaufman, an NHS accountant, said. "It was disturbing that she drew parallels between the Holocaust and what is happening in Gaza."

Some audience members reacted by heckling, shouting "rubbish" and "stop," before around ten people, including Kaufman and Rabbi Pink, walked out.

When the speech ended, the student received applause from those who remained, with at least one person giving a standing ovation, according to Kaufman.

Is this just a blip? – with the Gaza war and the general mis-reporting and the endless Free Palestine marches skewing the debate. Or is this a sign that we just can't do this any more? – that people would sooner forget, and return to those happy old days when they could just hate the Jews without having to feel guilty about it.

> against The Spectator for referring to Juno Dawson, a transgender author, as ‘a man who claims to be a woman’.

In further exciting news, Dawson has just joined the Dr Who writing team at the BBC.

in a dozen of them.

Killing over blasphemy against Islam isn’t a fringe Muslim belief; that should be evident from the number of states that endorse it, ranging from the newly self-identifying ‘moderate’ Arab states to the likes of Afghanistan and Syria now under jihadist control. Over the past fortnight alone, Iran and Pakistan have sentenced individuals to death over words, with growing persecution over blasphemy being witnessed worldwide, from the incarcerated in Indonesia to the lynched in Nigeria….

Sweden, which is now offering generous amounts of money for immigrants to leave the country, decided to find a loophole in its own legal commitment to free speech, including against all faiths, by issuing Momika a hate crime charge, which he was to formally receive at a district court today. With legal excuses already in place to co-opt Islamic law in Sweden, Momika has now been given the sharia penalty for blasphemy in Stockholm, even if extra-judicially.

Like Salwan Momika, his co-protester Salwan Najem has little faith in Swedish authorities protecting him from radical Muslims. ‘I am next’, he posted on X today. One hopes for Najem’s sake that he isn’t, but whoever inevitably is will be killed by the idea that Islam deserves special protection from freedom of speech.

Appeasing the Islamists, apart from the cowardly abandonment of free speech in the face of threats, and the effective introduction of blasphemy laws by the back door, doesn't even work. They'll still come for you.

Added;

Salwan Momika burned the Quran, arguing that Islam is a violent religion. In a grim twist of irony, he was murdered by those who sought to prove him wrong.

Salwan escaped Iraq in search of safety, hoping to find refuge in Europe. But even there, his voice was silenced by… pic.twitter.com/kL0XZbFTVW

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 30, 2025

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"Salwan escaped Iraq in search of safety, hoping to find refuge in Europe. But even there, his voice was silenced by violence.

"And this happened today, in the 21st century; a time when freedom of expression should be protected, yet people are still killed for their beliefs."

After yesterday's refections on the steady removal of any mention of Jews from Holocaust Memorial Day comes this, from the Times:

A Holocaust memorial exhibition has been banned from parliament for being too political even though the authorities have allowed pro-Palestinian activists to campaign in the same space….

A committee that advises the Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, said that the Vicious Circle exhibition would not fall within the criteria of being politically neutral. That ruling was questioned after it emerged that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) was allowed a stall in Westminster Hall in July last year. Supportive MPs were seen by witnesses speaking to members of the public who approached the stall….

The Vicious Circle installation was created by Marc Cave from the National Holocaust Centre and Museum. It tells the story of anti-Jewish pogroms from Kristallnacht in 1938 to Baghdad in 1941 and then October 7 2023.

Cave has already secured spots for the exhibition at the European parliament in Brussels and the Germany parliament in Berlin. But when he applied to bring it to Westminster Hall, for a week that would have included Holocaust Memorial Day, on January 27, his application was rejected.

“It’s one of the great tragedies, I think, of the social media era, and my fear is that by parliament being perhaps more ready to house one side of the argument but not the other — that’s kind of dangerous,” Cave told Times Radio.

"Kind of dangerous" is putting it mildly.

that time, if the gynecologist is found to have engaged in transphobia or denied another trans-identified male patient, he would be sanctioned again.

“We are pleased to have confirmation that what happened that day was totally abnormal,” the trans-identified male’s lawyer said.

Trans activist organization SOS Homophobie posted a statement to their website suggesting that the doctor’s actions were potentially “also punishable by criminal sanctions.”

Women’s rights advocate Margeurite Stern, who has also been harshly criticized by SOS Homophobie, commented on the situation on X. “Gynecologists are trained to treat WOMEN’s genitals. Not inverted penises or cavities created using pieces of colon or peritoneum,” Stern said. “We live in a world of lunatics.”

Yes, that would seem to be the case.

but peace and prosperity are exactly what democracy has delivered over the past eighty years. Great power conflict in Western Europe ended with World War II. It is now taken for granted that a war between, say, Germany and France is inconceivable, but this is among the greatest political achievements in the history of the continent. Despite the horrors of the Cold War, the Soviet Union collapsed without a fight. Former Soviet states lined up to join the West, while Russia has only managed to maintain its sphere of influence with force and coercion.

Although the war in Ukraine is the largest conflict on European soil since World War II, Western powers have helped Kyiv defend itself from Russian aggression without deploying any NATO forces on the battlefield. China is a rapidly rising power, but the militaries of the United States and its European and East Asian allies are far more powerful. There is anxious talk of a “new authoritarian axis” comprising China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. But NATO defence spending is three times higher than this axis, and it has surged since the invasion of Ukraine. NATO has also continued to expand with the recent accession of Finland and Sweden.

Democracies have created historically unprecedented economic prosperity. Marxists assumed that conditions for a growing majority of workers would inevitably get worse while a shrinking capitalist class would get richer and richer—a status quo that would eventually spark revolution. Instead, there has been vast wealth creation at all levels of society in democratic countries.

It may seem like the main threats to the open society today are authoritarian foes like Russia and China, but a much greater threat is the crisis of confidence in democratic institutions. The leaders in Moscow and Beijing may purport to offer an alternative to liberal democracy, but we aren’t in the middle of an ideological Cold War. Vladimir Putin has imperial ambitions, but he’s well aware that his decaying petro-autocracy isn’t some bold new political idea that could take root elsewhere. Xi Jinping is a nationalist who believes China deserves to be a great power, but China’s unique blend of totalitarianism and economic growth can’t be replicated. Third-rate dictatorships like Venezuela or North Korea don’t even pretend to care about anything beyond personal power and corruption, while the ideology of antique theocracies like Iran will never win a mass following around the world. […]

Although The Open Society and Its Enemies is a powerful indictment of historicism, we no longer live in an era dominated by historicist fantasies like Marxism. We live in an era of political nihilism—an era in which the gravest threat to democracy isn’t a rival ideology like communism; it’s the collapsing faith in democracy among citizens of open societies. As Fukuyama explained, the success of liberal democracy isn’t just material—it’s in the “realm of consciousness or ideas.” This is the battlefield for the open society today, and it’s why Popper’s most important contribution goes beyond his attack on historicism.

I seem to recall that Popper used to be regarded as on the Right: as someone not fully in step with the great progressive improvement projects of recent times. I suppose that was back in the day when being on the Left meant having at least some warm feelings towards Marxism, or at least Trotskyism as a kind of fantasy Marxism without all the nasty Soviet/gulag/Maoist/Pol Pot bits. How it could have been if it wasn't for that nasty Stalin. But surely we're past that now.

Anyway, yes – worth a read.