Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • Abrahamic religions

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    Presumably "Abrahamic religions" so he can hope for Christian support and won't be accused of antisemitism – and it won't be too obvious that he's just pushing for a blasphemy law to protect Islam. Too bad for the Hindus and Sikhs though.

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  • The UN’s role in Gaza and Lebanon “directly entwined with the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah”

    Seth Frantzman in the JC on the symbiotic relationships between the UN organisations UNRWA and UNIFIL, and the terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah:

    In both Gaza and Lebanon the UN was supposed to play a positive role, yet in each place massive UN bureaucracies have ended up shielding terror groups and enabling their growth. Unrwa has not worked against Hamas in Gaza, and Unifil has not fulfilled its mandate to prevent Hezbollah turning southern Lebanon into an armed camp.

    Unrwa and Unifil are both massive organisations. Unrwa has more than 150 facilities in Gaza with thousands of personnel, and in Lebanon Unifil has more than 10,000 soldiers and dozens of posts and bases in the south of the country….

    Hamas grew exponentially more powerful after 2007 by outsourcing civilian needs to Unrwa and various NGOs. While those groups fed and educated people, Hamas built command centres under Unrwa facilities and infiltrated hospitals. Despite Hamas bringing war on Gaza every year or two after 2007, the international community never acted to weaken Hamas and prevent it exploiting the presence of Unrwa and other humanitarian bodies. Instead a symbiotic relationship was enabled. While the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank had to take responsibility for civilians, in Gaza Hamas prepared for war while Unrwa and others took care of civilians. This enabled war, rather than reducing the incentive for Hamas to carry out attacks such as the October 7 massacre.

    In Lebanon a similar process unfolded after 2007. Unifil was supposed to work with the Lebanese army to make sure Hezbollah did not return to southern Lebanon. Instead Hezbollah grew ever more powerful. Hezbollah expanded its arsenal from around 13,000 rockets in 2006 to 150,000 by 2023. All this occurred under the eyes of Unifil. Instead of fulfilling UN Resolution 1701, which was supposed to prevent Hezbollah returning to threaten Israel, Unifil appears to have done less after 2006 than it did before the war.

    In essence, the UN took control of southern Lebanon and Gaza as two colonies on the border of Israel and in each an Iranian-backed proxy force emerged as a powerful army. Hamas on October 7 and Hezbollah on the same day were more powerful than many nations. Most countries don’t have 150,000 rockets. There is no other conclusion that can be drawn from the disastrous experience of 2006-2023 than seeing the UN’s role in Gaza and Lebanon as being directly entwined with the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah.

    Not only does UNRWA perpetuate Palestinians as refugees; it educates them in Jew hatred.

  • Winter fuel payments

    iple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer, is one of those who has lost her winter fuel payment and described the cold as “crippling”.

    Ms van Bueren said: “It seeps into your bones and sits there. It consumes you. With each year that passes, I feel myself fading a little more. I’m just over the limit for pension credit so I won’t get my winter fuel allowance anymore and I do wonder if I will see the other side of this winter.”

    Critics warned that the NHS, which experienced an acute winter crisis last year as a result of strikes and missed targets, could be overwhelmed by pensioners made ill by the cold.

    Campaign groups and charities have warned that thousands more elderly retirees are at risk becoming ill due to Ms Reeves’s decision.

  • BBC “workplace day of action” for Palestine

    ace.

    The call to action was shared by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) with its members last week as it condemned the Israeli government’s attacks, which it said have led to the deaths of at least 135 Palestinian journalists since 7 October 2023.

    “The NUJ is urging branches and chapels to show support on the day and amplify the union’s calls,” it said….

    One journalist said that they were reconsidering their NUJ membership after the “hypocritical and antisemitic” action. “BBC journalists, who pride themselves on impartiality and who fought to keep their NUJ free of politics, are being encouraged to break the BBC’s editorial guidelines by supporting a political cause,” they added.

    “It is also a shocking attack on Jews. Where is the day of action to support the journalists being killed by their own governments across the Middle East, including by Hamas? Where is the NUJ support for Russian journalists that are being held behind bars on trumped up charges by Putin’s regime, those dying or working in perilous conditions in Ukraine?”

    Another staffer added that they were “dreading the thought of walking past anyone protesting at work”.

    Charlotte Henry, a freelance journalist who runs The Addition, a media and tech newsletter, said that she had quit the union over its stance. “It has become a hostile environment for Jews, and I can no longer be a part of that,” she said.

    No other conflict, of course, would be granted such a partisan "day of action". But where Jews are involved…well, it's different. And the BBC has plenty of form.

  • Forming a reactionary organization

    ming a “reactionary organization.”

    Choe is undergoing a preliminary examination by state security officials. The source said she may avoid severe punishment because her son serves in Unit 974, the bodyguard unit protecting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

    The incident has intensified public questioning of the calendar system’s suspension. “As people learn about this, they say they too wonder why the Juche dating system disappeared,” the source said. “People think it’s even stranger that no explanation was given, and someone was arrested just for mentioning it.”

    Strange is the least of it. There's already no culture in North Korea outside of Kim worship. At this rate it'll soon be illegal to even talk of anything but the glories of the great leader.

  • Kenwood morning

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  • In Oslo

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  • BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year 2024

    ;
    ~ the female is taking performance enhancing drugs;
    ~ the female is seriously ill (and would be very unlikely to be performing in elite sport).

    Being barred from the most prestigious tournament in Africa has been no barrier to a glittering career in the women’s game for Banda. Although a contract with Real Madrid was withdrawn after Banda’s ban, the player went on to represent Zambia at the 2023 Women’s World Cup in Australia and at the Tokyo and Paris Olympic Games. FIFA and the International Olympic Committee have no requirement for female athletes to prove their sex is actually female. Banda, a former professional in women’s boxing, currently plays for the USA-based team Orlando Pride.

    Yet again, women’s sport is being brought into disrepute (and women footballers put at risk of serious injury) by weak governing bodies that refuse to stand up for fairness and safety for females. If female footballers fail ‘gender eligibility’ this raises inevitable questions over their sex.

    Well, he's won.

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    Added:

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  • The UN and the Gaza “genocide”

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    Full text:

    Alice Nderitu, an accomplished mediator specializing in genocide prevention, led an office that issued a guidance paper on the proper use of the term “genocide.” The paper emphasized that UN officials should “adhere to the correct usage” of the term due to its political and legal sensitivities and its frequent misuse to describe large-scale crimes against specific populations.

    Nderitu, who has served at the UN since 2020, was dismissed for asserting that Israel’s war with Hamas does not constitute genocide. She explained that while the conflict has caused significant loss of life, Israel’s actions aim to dismantle a terrorist regime, not to exterminate an ethnic group. She also noted that Israel has made efforts to minimize civilian casualties, even as Hamas uses civilians as human shields to exploit their deaths for propaganda.

    Her position clashes with UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s manufactured narrative.

    The UN is not neutral or impartial when it comes to Israel— you can’t deny it now.

    More at the Jerusalem Post.

  • Not just a tragedy but a scandal

    how people self-identify dates back to 2004.

    Now LLLGB, the UK charity under the LLL umbrella, is in the thick of the battle. Until recently a majority of its trustees had been fighting to remain true to the organisation’s founding mission. They came under fire from a minority of local leaders who support male lactation, and from LLL International, which accused them of challenging LLL policy publicly in a disparaging manner. In May it suspended them as leaders, which meant they could no longer hold meetings. They allege this left the women they had been working with unsupported and put their positions on the charity’s board in doubt.

    At the beginning of this month one of their number, Miriam Main, resigned. In her resignation note she spoke of “bullying, lies and cruelty of recent times”. And on November 16 the other trustees allied with her were removed by a vote of UK-based leaders.

    What makes this not just a tragedy but a scandal is that UK law is clear that no male person is a “mother”. Even a gender recognition certificate, the paperwork that changes a person’s recorded sex for certain administrative purposes, doesn’t change a person’s legal status from being a father to a mother, or vice versa. Since LLLGB was set up to support “mothers”, its trustees were simply doing their job when they refused to support male lactation.

    The women I spoke to for this article expressed grief and betrayal at seeing the organisation they love buy into an ideology that denies biological reality and harms mothers and babies. But they also see hope among the wreckage. Breastfeeding rarely makes the headlines, and though this row has been surreal and painful it gives an opportunity to tell the world about its importance and unites them in their determination to recreate what was destroyed.

    Of all the victories of the gender cult, this has to be one of the most astonishing. How on earth have the women who run La Leche League become so transfixed by the need to indulge men in their sexualised breastfeeding fantasies?

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