Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • Very urgent business

    As I wrote yesterday, where's Christopher Hitchens when you need him……

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  • Las Pelilargas

    an style=”font-size: 11pt”>While her approaches to identifying subjects and pinpointing unique ways to share their stories have shifted since the project started, Werning’s intent has remained constant: to honor and celebrate “their long hair, the patience and love and dedication of years of growing it.”

  • Sudan’s forgotten war

    have been destroyed in the war, along with most of the country’s main pharmaceutical production plants. The strain on the remaining facilities is intense. Al-Naw hospital currently receives between 500 and 600 patients a day — many patients were being treated as they lay on the floor.

    A graph showing who's responsible for the violence makes it clear that it's overwhelmingly down to the Rapid Support Forces [RSF], with 77% of all violent incidents against civilians. Loyd talks about their campaign of ethnic cleansing, but never spells it out. The RSF is primarily composed of the notorious Janjaweed militias which previously fought on behalf of the Sudanese government, killing and raping its way across Darfur. Its actions were deemed crimes against humanity by Human Rights Watch. They are largely Arab, and their targets, the victims of their ethnic cleansing, were and still are black Africans.

    As I noted back in May, after a Times report from Jane Flanagan (My dark skin is a death sentence in Darfur), whoever's doing the PR for the Arabs is doing one hell of a job. In Sudan Arab groups slaughter black Africans and have "slave hunts", with women and girls being rounded up…it doesn't make the news apart from the odd largely ignored report on the back pages, and no one cares. In Gaza, though, the Arabs are the biggest victims ever as the Israelis take strong action to counter the Hamas Islamic jihad against Jews, and the world explodes in protest. 

  • Leading the nation to its destiny

    cretary-general of the group, which claims to be the largest democratic voice of British Muslims. However, a report by Policy Exchange, the think tank, has uncovered “deeply disturbing” remarks by the pair, according to a former Muslim MP.

    In comments from 2022, Akhter called being a Muslim an “act of revolutionary defiance … at odds with the prevailing culture” and advocated that British Muslims identify primarily as Muslim rather than as British….

    In speeches in 2023, Akhter said Muslims should “organise” and “unite” into a “powerful community” which would “change from the hand that is begging to the hand that is giving”.

    Adrees wrote a glowing report on the dictatorial Iranian regime in 2017 after a trip to Tehran. In an article for Islam Today he praised Ruhollah ­Khomeini, the former supreme leader of Iran, and “the Iranian Revolution, when the great leader led the nation to its destiny”. He wrote warmly in support of the republic and spoke of how it respects minorities, despite claims that the country had carried out executions for blasphemy that year.

  • Understanding history

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  • More trees

    Oh yes. These hornbeams from yesterday at Queen's Wood. Too wet today.

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  • Understanding Iraq

    hould the Allies have planned better for the sftermath?…have retained more of Saddam's men for the rebuild? Well, yes, no doubt. But it was always going to be a nightmare with Iran next door. A Sunni regime, that they'd been at war with just a couple of decades back, ruling over a Shia majority, finally overthrown?…of course they were going to take every opportunity to interfere. And of course they did. 

    And yes…Syria. Iraq and Syria were the two Ba'athist dictatorships. Of the two, at the time, Saddam's regime was surely the more brutal – as anyone who read Kenan Makiya's Republic of Fear or Cruelty and Silence will attest – with psychopathic sons Uday and Qusay waiting in the wings. The West overthrew Saddam, but Obama declined to intervene in Syria, having learnt the orthodox line that Iraq had been a disaster. Result? The disaster of Syria dwarfed that of Iraq: some 600,ooo slain, millions fleeing the country, Putin testing out his aerial bombardment of civilians and hospitals ready for Ukraine…

    Patrikarakos is having none of it. That's clealry not one of the orthodoxies he has in mind:

    The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a historic mistake. We should not have done it. But we did, and in so doing we removed a brutal and sadistic dictator, but one who nevertheless kept chaos at bay. Chaos that, lest we forget, is built into the Iraqi state, carved illogically from three Ottoman provinces, and filled with a toxic mix of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. Iraq was constructed (by us and the French no less) as if it were designed to be a sectarian tinderbox; and once Saddam’s controlling authority was gone, that tinderbox erupted. Last year, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, I reported for UnHerd from Baghdad where my fixer Ammar told me something that has lodged, ineradicably, in my mind ever since. “We had so much hope in the beginning,” he said. “Then the country turned to a path of blood, and then people started to want Saddam back to keep order. Even with all the misery he brought.”

    Well OK. But note that “We had so much hope in the beginning”. Should we really have left Saddam in charge, defying UN sanctions, terrorising his people with a secret police force and a prison system of torture and death that put Syria's in the shade? And who's to blame that it didn't work out after Saddam's overthrow led to that hope in the hearts of so many Iraqis? Yes, we should have done better. But might Iran not take some of the blame? The Iraqi politicians, even?

    Ah….where's Christopher Hitchens now we need him?

  • Irreplaceable for Palestine refugees

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  • Blinken on Israel and Hamas

    ernment’s conduct, but the fact remains:… pic.twitter.com/mTrk5zjDYr

    — Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) January 4, 2025

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    "You can disagree with the Israeli government’s conduct, but the fact remains: Hamas is the key obstacle to reaching a deal."

  • Bullseye

    hose two inches of darting ivory which determine the difference between success and failure, between genius and mediocrity, they must be thrown by fat men. You cannot think darts into a treble or a bullseye. You dare not pause long enough to give reflection a sniff. You must throw with a sort of cultivated disdain that is not given to the thin.

    If only, my dear parents, you had snatched enough time from your cerebral labours to watch a game of darts. Actually watched one. You would, had you done so, I am sure, have marvelled at the contrast between the overflowing physical abundance of the man throwing and the refined and dainty precision with which he throws. It is a contrast at once aesthetically satisfying and philosophically baffling. How can it be? See an arrow fly in slow motion, see how much it arches and how far it deviates, and it is a miracle it ever finds its target. Would you not imagine the thrower of such a missile to be a person of near supernatural exactitude? And now look who he is!; ‘Tis I, your clumsy and in all other regards bumbling and maladroit son.

    The crowd who cheer me don’t bother their heads with any of that. They pour beer down their throats and sing Stand up if You Love the Darts. But you, mother and father, aficionados of art in all mysterious manifestations, are just the people to understand dart’s artistry and yet, out of small-minded snobbery, you look away. And so you miss the marvel and the rare beauty of it. A cheetah can run, a tiger burns bright in the forests of the night, but only your fat, clumsy son can, without raising a sweat, hit a treble-20 from eight feet away whenever he wants to.

    I've cycled up round Ally Pally a few times over the past couple of weeks, and the darts crowd are always fabulous: a phalanx marching up the hill all dressed as traffic cones, or smurfs, or in Ali G outfits, or with dartboards round their heads. Mostly blokes, but by no means all blokes. Already good-naturedly boozed up, with loads more boozing to come.

    Janice Turner had this mid-week in the Times:

    I love everything about the darts. I love how men who, because of their looks and physiques and social class only get to be minor characters in TV soaps, are fist-pumping heroes here. I love how the audience is seated at long tables, drinking great pitchers of beer, as if at a Hogwarts feast. I admire the players’ lightning mental arithmetic and laser focus despite a raucous, silly crowd. I like Michael van Gerwen’s phrenologically fascinating head and Luke Littler’s pretty eyes. I wish only for a Joan Rivers red-carpet interviewer to ask the fancy-dressed fans why they chose traffic cones/prawns/Mexicans/Oompa Loompas as their team uniform. Otherwise it is a perfect bullseye.

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