Author: Mick Hartley

in antiquity used Christian blood in rituals) and the Holocaust, as well as “poems about Israeli children living on other children’s graves”. One picture, she said, depicted “two trenches filled with bodies, one showing Jewish skeletons from the Holocaust” and the second body bags “that said [they] were from Gaza” — drawing direct parallels between the Nazis and Israel.

Hannah and her colleagues filed a complaint to the trust last December. A year on there has been no resolution and she has received no formal update, despite repeated requests.

Several of her Jewish friends working in the trust had left because of the working environment. Hannah herself is considering leaving the NHS entirely. “There’s a double standard and it’s institutional,” she said….

.@RichardBratby is telling me about trigger warnings at Gilbert and Sullivan. Amazing … we’re actually offended by the Victorians. pic.twitter.com/KNl4wxbf5A

— Dr Annette Rubery (@AnnetteRubery) December 7, 2024

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Another absurd article on the current SCOTUS case, on the same lines as that Nation article, setting up the brave fighters for "gender-affirming care" against the wicked right-wing forces of reaction. This time, no surprise, it's from the Guardian's US correspondent Moira Donegan – How did transgender children in the US become so politicized? "The US supreme court is likely to uphold a flimsy and bad-faith Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors".

The politicization of transgender children in the US is one of the most astounding coups of propaganda and organized animus in recent history. Rarely has so much attention and rage been directed at such a minuscule number of people, and more rarely, still, have those people been the most vulnerable and blameless among us: kids and teens….

These changes in public attitudes towards trans youth – from a broad if imperfect sentiment of tolerance to a widespread and politically weaponized attitude of hostility toward a small minority of kids – did not emerge by accident. It was the product of a deliberate, conscious effort to radicalize large swaths of the United States, and significant chunks of state policy, into a hostility towards a few children.

And so on. Once the preposterous idea is accepted that there are these supposed transgender children – children somehow "born in the wrong body" – then all the rest follows. But of course there aren't. It's nonsense. It's the insistence that these troubled and vulnerable kids, victims of a social contagion, need to undergo drastic and ireversible medical procedures rather than go through a normal puberty which is the real regressive homophobic scandal.

The real "one of the most astounding coups of propaganda….in recent history" is surely that so much of the liberal left have lost their minds to the cult of gender.

Dominic Sandbrook in the Times, in the wake of the shambolic martial law pronouncement by South Korea's president Yoon, looks at other coup failures – including the largely forgotten effort here planned by "the megalomaniac media chairman" Cecil Harmsworth King:

Having endorsed Labour’s Harold Wilson in 1964, King was furious not to have been offered a hereditary peerage and was appalled by Britain’s apparent economic decline. High above the Mirror’s Holborn headquarters, he brooded alone in a vast office decorated with 18th-century Italian tables, Persian carpets, Anatolian prayer mats and entire bookcases of rare antiquities. In his desk drawer he kept a list of possible ministers in a potential “Emergency Government”, to be led ideally by himself. And in the late spring of 1968 he decided the time had come to strike.

On May 8, King and the veteran Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp drove to the country house of the Queen’s second cousin Lord Mountbatten, formerly viceroy of India and supreme allied commander in southeast Asia. Having been shown in, King announced that within weeks “the government would disintegrate, there would be bloodshed in the streets [and] the armed forces would be involved”. The British people, he declared, would need Mountbatten to take charge, “a leader of men … backed by the best brains and administrators in the land”.

At first, according to King’s own account, Mountbatten seemed tempted. Then his close friend Sir Solly Zuckerman, the government’s chief scientific adviser, joined the party and the mood changed. Zuckerman could not believe what he was hearing. “This is rank treachery!” he exclaimed. “All this talk of machine guns at street corners is appalling. I am a public servant and will have nothing further to do with it. Nor should you, Dickie.” Then he walked out.

Had Mountbatten really been tempted? It seems much more likely that he was humouring an eccentric guest, though we’ll never know for certain. Either way, King left empty-handed. A few days later he tried to launch a desultory version of his putsch anyway, devoting the front page of the Mirror to an apocalyptic signed editorial ordering Labour MPs to ditch Wilson for a new leader.

The reaction was total derision and three weeks later King was sacked by the IPC board.

Yes I know: it was always ridiculous – though I have my doubts about Mountbatten. Still, a Jewish intervention saving the day….a Jew the only one who can see the "rank treachery", surrounded by these upper-crust buffoons. My take: once again we see the centrality of Jews in British life. 

We're watching a massive, unevidenced medical experiment unfold in real time and it's shameful that lawsuits seem the only way to stop it. The cowardice of politicians and medics who let this happen, and the hubris of the idiots who cheered it on, must never be forgotten.

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 7, 2024

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Hard not to feel angry when you remember the way UK academia almost entirely rolled over for this blatantly evil malpractice. "Detransitioners are a myth", "it's a moral panic", "it's life-saving healthcare" and other obvious falsehoods, repeated ad infinitum. https://t.co/I0L5quYHTS

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) December 6, 2024

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adding-left: 40px”>It was only after the girl started taking testosterone at age 13 and had her breasts surgically removed the following year that she actually became suicidal and tried to take her own life, according to the suit. The girl reportedly suffered increasingly severe psychosis, including auditory and visual hallucinations. Dr. Olson-Kennedy ultimately recommended a hysterectomy when the girl was 17….

This is a big one.

Growing up with the black and white photos and films of the attempted destruction of my people, I never imagined that one day I’d be seeing the same images in colour. pic.twitter.com/WkmzLJRJjR

— Josh Howie (@joshxhowie) December 6, 2024

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From the JC:

Australian police are investigating after a Melbourne charedi synagogue was subjected to an arson attack while worshippers were inside.

:

Meanwhile, and related, an anonymous academic speaks up in the JC about antisemitism in UK universities.

As a non-Jewish lecturer at a major university, I can confirm that British academia is structurally racist against Jews. The penny finally dropped as I was second-marking a piece of undergraduate writing in which Jews were openly compared to scurrying vermin, spreading disease.

The student’s illiterate use of grammar, nonsensical punctuation and mixed metaphors would surely have embarrassed Goebbels. But Hitler’s arch propagandist would just as surely have approved of the spirit of the piece. Not that this was a uniquely awful specimen of the kind of “work” I’ve had to face as first and second marker of a large cohort of students since the horror of October 7.

A different piece, produced by a student in the same year group, accused its readers, in the foulest language, of complicity with “genocide” and of “sleeping” while the IDF killed innocent civilians for target practice.

The obvious Jew-hatred of these pieces of writing were one thing. But then there were the comments of the first academic who had marked them, which praised the “Jews-as-vermin” piece as a moving indictment of Israeli “colonisation” that displayed a fine philosophical turn of phrase and a carefulness of language. As for the “genocide” piece, my colleague reassured the student that his message was deeply important.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem: not the fact that immature, 20-year-old students have been brought up on a diet of hating the West, hating Jews and unashamedly milking their self-declared victim status, but the fact that this pernicious nonsense is actively encouraged, praised and taught by the academy…

Well yes. Young hot-headed students may perhaps be afforded some slack here, but those academics who encourage it – that's something else altogether.

ved mixed reviews. A riff on George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, the book tells the tale of a postapocalyptic civilization governed by a fundamentalist cult that bears more than a passing resemblance to Salafism. And to many on the chic left, it was just another example of benighted boobs hating on the religion of peace.

“In twenty years, when the Islamophobic waters of France have ebbed, we will wonder how we could have gotten so excited about such a slow thriller,” wrote the editor at the time of the magazine Paris Match, adding that “fear is an excellent appeal” and that Sansal was merely exaggerating the threat Islam posed to the Western world.

Earlier this year, Sansal, feeling that his own safety in Algeria could no longer be guaranteed, became a French citizen. President Macron attended the ceremony. And yet, the writer refused calls to stay away from his native land. Like all writers worth a damn, he refused to cower and chose, instead, to fight.

And now he’s in custody, held by an authoritarian regime and accused of imaginary crimes. And while some of the literary world’s braver souls are standing up and demanding his release—a tip of the hat, as always, to the brave Salman Rushdie—most of our bien-pensants are silent. The same mediocrities who collected awards while squawking about the fictitious genocide in Gaza are once again siding with the marauders, betraying a far greater writer seized for the sin of adhering to humanism’s core commitments.