as they say in America, over gender ideology. No one wants to demean or discriminate against trans people. As For Women Scotland would say: live how you want, love whom you wish, but don’t tell women what a woman is. They were born that way.
Author: Mick Hartley
-
Virginia Senior Women’s Golfer of the Year
#SaveWomensSports For the FOURTH year in a row, the VSGA Senior Women's Golfer of the Year is a man.
"Read more about Andrea’s dominating year in the November/December issue of Virginia Golfer."
But of course, I'm told they don't dominate, so surely this must be a mistake.… pic.twitter.com/CPFnchnYqX
— HeCheated.org (@hecheateddotorg) December 22, 2024
-
Captagon
by, um, North Korea. Though, according to recent reports, that may no longer be the case:
Opium is replacing methamphetamine as the drug of choice in North Korea as the pandemic has disrupted Chinese supplies of the raw materials needed to make meth, residents in the country told Radio Free Asia.
Perhaps a similar switch could happen in Syria and the Middle East. Afghanistan may no longer be the world's largest opium supplier – overtaken by Myanmar after the Taliban imposed a ban in 2022 – but it still goes on. Keeping it all, as it were, in the Islamic family.
-
The fight to sterilise unhappy children
So happy that all those boring things like workers rights are sorted
It gives Unions the time to do important stuff like fight to sterilise unhappy children 🤦♀️ pic.twitter.com/d1S1LKeeBM
— Caro Betts (@BettsCaro) December 22, 2024
-
Nuclear Iran
dramatically against Ali Khamenei, spurring his nuclear project on. The only solution, argues Samsami, is for the regime to be overthrown, before it becomes too powerful.
“In such dire circumstances, the regime is likely to invest significantly more energy and resources in building a nuclear bomb, as confirmed by intelligence obtained by the Iranian Resistance.
“The only long-term solution to prevent the world’s most dangerous regime from obtaining the world’s most dangerous weapon is its overthrow by the people and the organised Resistance – a goal that is more attainable now than ever before.”
Well yes, of course. The prospects of the mullahs with nuclear weapons doesn't bear thinking about. They're governed not by normal political humanitarian restraints but by an apocalyptic vision of the coming of the Mahdi. Loss of life means next to nothing in such eschatalogical thinking. In the absence of any push to bring down the regime, Israel – Iran's number one target – will surely have to consider targeted strikes.
-
Questioning the new Syrian leader
ues to evade questions about dress codes for Syrian women, many of whom are anxious about the prospect of HTS forcing them to cover their heads.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s imposition of a strict religious dress code was a sign of much worse to come. If HTS really wanted to signal a break with its Islamist past, it could rule out compulsory hijab in Syria not just for now, while the world is watching, but in the future.
Its behaviour towards women will be the litmus test of whether Sharaa’s bland assurances about a secular state are genuine, yet Western reporters seem reluctant to press him. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the world’s media is so desperate for a positive outcome in Syria that they’re too quick to discount the possibility that the country will become another Afghanistan.
The signs are not good.
Just two years ago, a report described HTS’s “restriction of religious freedom” in Idlib as “deeply burdensome, especially for women and girls”. It said that schools set up by the organisation enforce segregation by sex and allow little room for dissent from a jihadist version of Islam. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom reported that HTS had given orders to ban married female students, including girls subjected to forced marriage, from attending public schools and universities.
This is Taliban-like behaviour, reinforcing the need for follow-up questions when the group’s leaders make sweeping statements about their attitude towards women’s education. Instead, they are met with a surprising degree of naïveté or, worse, an assumption that the status of women matters less in Syria than security and financial stability. But the idea that the country might one day look like Afghanistan isn’t far-fetched.
HTS emerged from an Islamist militia, the al-Nusra Front, which was al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria until 2016. Sharaa had a long association with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of Isis, which notoriously abducted and trafficked women, including thousands of Yazidis. Baghdadi himself repeatedly raped an American hostage, Kayla Mueller, who was killed in Syria in 2015. This is a history few Western reporters raise as they marvel at HTS’s rapid advance in Syria and Sharaa’s supposed conversion to secular politics….
Scenes of celebration in the streets of Damascus after the ignominious flight of Bashar al-Assad were moving to watch, but they also filled me with trepidation. They reminded me of Tehran after the removal of the Shah, when a popular revolution was hijacked by mullahs who rule Iran to this day with their pitiless brand of misogyny. Instead of romanticising Syria’s new leader, Western correspondents have a duty to ask searching questions. Sending sceptical female journalists to interview him, instead of jovial male interrogators, would be a start.
It's all part of the carefully honed "moderate jihad" approach. There are very good reasons to have concerns about the direction Syria may be taking.
-
Magdeburg misinformation
latform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Full text:
The man who was arrested for the most recent terrorist attack on a Christmas market- this time in Magdeburg, Germany- is allegedly Saudi national Taleb Al Abdulmohsen. I’ve known him for years (online only) and he never seemed stable to me. He obsessively went after an ExMuslim Saudi woman. He wanted my help in ‘exposing’ her and turned aggressive when I wouldn’t comply. Friends have shared with me that he was targeting other Saudi female activists as well. I still can’t believe this is real. I knew he was unhinged, and I wanted to keep my distance, but I never suspected he’d be violent.
There is suspicion now that he was actually working w Saudi authorities to bring down Saudi female activists. And although I cannot confirm this obviously, I will say that this theory aligns with my experience and exchanges with him.
This is a tragedy on top of a tragedy on top of a tragedy. This will now make it harder for ExMuslims to seek asylum in EU or anywhere probably. It will also feed the racist narrative that all Arabs are terrorists, regardless of their faith- which I’ve already seen gaining predictable traction. The epicenter of this is the tragedy of the families of those killed and the trauma the survivors and their families will endure, of course, but even the far-reaching ripple effects of this will continue to cause devastation for so many.
-
The NHS ‘calendar of awareness’ 2025
hs, to be marked next year.
After various religious holidays and festivals are removed, there are about 240 events left, and about one in eight is related to LGBT people.
A source said most awareness days and weeks were not typically marked in any way, but those relating to transgender people tended to be “highly visible” and get blog posts, emailed to all staff and put on the NHS staff homepage.
“The main issue is excessive airtime for awareness days for trans people and their gender identities and rules, and these are riddled with falsehoods about being more likely to be victims of murder or discrimination,” the source said. “And if you challenge it, you are a bigot.”
They queried why staff were spending so much time on promoting these days rather than doing their jobs.
Well yes.
The 31 awareness days and weeks for this group on the NHS list is significantly more than any other topic or area, followed by cancer, which has almost half the awareness events noted at just 16….
Among the days being celebrated there is a transgender parent day, a pansexual and panromantic awareness and visibility day, an intersex day of solidarity, a transgender day of remembrance, a national coming out day, and an international pronouns day, the NHS says.
You'd be forgiven for thinking this was some kind of parody: "a transgender parent day, a pansexual and panromantic awareness and visibility day, an intersex day of solidarity, a transgender day of remembrance, a national coming out day, and an international pronouns day". Alas not.
As if that wasn't enough…
There is also an LGBT history month throughout January and a trans awareness month in November.
It's all a bit obsessive.
Kate Barker, chief executive of charity LGB Alliance, said: “Instead of celebrating made-up pronouns, the NHS should be raising awareness of the scandal of unevidenced, experimental medicalisation of gender-distressed young people.
“Marking Detransition Awareness Day on March 12th would be a welcome step in ending the irreversible damage – often inflicted by the NHS itself – on youth who are otherwise likely to grow up happily gay or lesbian.”
Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, a human rights charity said: “The NHS has one job: to provide healthcare to everyone. No doubt that does involve public health messaging, like days to raise awareness of dementia or menopause symptoms.
“But endless tripe about special identities is not only tiresome, it’s a distraction from what medical professionals should be doing. It makes NHS staff look obsessed with trivial nonsense like made-up genders and preferred pronouns. Over time that’s bound to erode patients’ trust.
“This is all a waste of time and money. The NHS needs to drop the performative nonsense and focus its efforts on treating sick people and improving the nation’s health.”
