Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • The Canadian intifada

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  • Planes in the park

    London plane trees in Finsbury Park this morning:

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    [Click to enlarge]

  • Strip-searching

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  • Presenting his “feminine self”

    And, talking of institutional group think and what you have to put up with – enthuse about – if you want to get on, try this one.

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  • Institutional group think

    Janice Turner in the Times, after the Children in Need debacle – and Justin Welby, and the Post Office scandal – on the wilful blindness that allows all kinds of nonsense to thrive in so many large organisations:

    In an authoritarian, violently repressive regime such as Nazi Germany, or Russia and Iran today, would you be brave enough to speak out? This was the question Jemimah Steinfeld, granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, posed to Wednesday’s Index on Censorship awards. Few of us, thankfully, will ever need to put our physical courage to this test — but what about our moral courage?

    Why are institutions full of people prepared to overlook malpractice, abuse or injustice conducted within their professional field of vision, while just a cussed few speak out? […]

    The unspoken belief “I am a good person, ergo everything I do must be good” afflicts all organisations that proclaim their own virtue, from religions to progressive campaigns and charities. It is why management at the Tavistock Gids clinic ostracised and thwarted Sonia Appleby, its safeguarding leader, for raising staff’s concerns about prescription of puberty blockers: the righteousness of child transition was beyond all question. Ideology is always the enemy of truth.

    Blessed are the whistleblowers, not the self-righteous who think they have God’s ear. The Private Eye editor, Ian Hislop, who has been the conduit for many, notes they are often difficult people: prickly, obsessive, annoying. Because speaking out means being unafraid to stand alone.

    It's no great mystery. The people who thrive in large organisations tend to be the people who don't question anything, agree to all the boss's wonderful suggestions with enthusiasm, and make sure they toe the line on all the right issues. 

    Ian Hislop? Well, yes, Private Eye has played its part no doubt, though goodness knows it's got enough things wrong – the MMR vaccine and autism comes to mind. But like all such "prickly" institutions if they go on for long enough, it's lost its prickle as Hislop becomes as establishment a figure as you could wish for. He's avoided the whole trans issue, as Graham Linehan reminded us, and Have I Got News For You, as I argued years ago, is off the charts with its smugness – Hislop leading the way.

  • In Italy

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  • Final solution

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  • Baltimore Transit and the one-armed painter

    ass=”asset-img-link” href=”https://www.shorpy.com/node/27600?size=_original#caption” style=”display: inline”>image from www.shorpy.com
    "Baltimore, Maryland. One-armed painter, hired since the war, repainting the interior of a trolley at the maintenance terminal of the Baltimore Transit Company."
    [Photos: Shorpy/Marjory Collins for the Office of War Information]

  • Antisemites on the staff

    From the JC:

    The restaurant critic Jay Rayner left the Observer because “there are antisemites on the [Guardian] staff” and the editor, Kath Viner, “likes to deny it,” he wrote on a private Facebook post seen by the JC.

    In the post, Rayner wrote: “I'm not sorry to be leaving Guardian newspapers. For years now being Jewish, however non-observant, and working for the company has been uncomfortable, at times excruciating.

    "Viner likes to deny it but there are antisemites on the daily's staff and she has not had the courage to face them down. For years now I have made a point of sending her a back channel email each time the Guardian has published another outrage. It will be a joy to know that I'm not a part of that anymore.”

    Surely not.

  • The ICC and Israel

    where prosecutors have the right to discontinue proceedings if it is in the interests of justice to do so. By seemingly cornering Mr Netanyahu, the ICC gives him no other choice than to double down.

    Meanwhile, the next American administration may well impose sanctions against the ICC as a result of the warrants, which would cripple its operations, so that the warrants’ supporters may only achieve a Pyrrhic victory. As Professor Richard Ekins KC of the University of Oxford writes, the lawfare against Israel only damages the credibility of the institutions that engage in it.

    From that Richard Ekins October article:

    In late December 2023, South Africa began proceedings in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging that Israel had committed and was committing genocide against the Palestinians. 

    This was an extraordinary allegation to make in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October atrocities, when Israel was using force in self-defence to attempt to rescue hostages and to degrade Hamas’s capacity to commit further acts of mass murder, rape, and hostage-taking….

    The political deployment of legal processes stepped up in May, when the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) applied for arrest warrants against the Prime Minister and Defence Minister of Israel, as well as against Hamas commanders.

    This was a very ill-judged decision on the part of the prosecutor, implying an equivalence between terrorists who had openly committed mass murder and the leaders of a democratic state using force in self-defence against them.

    It remains to be seen whether the ICC will issue arrest warrants. [They have now! – MH] What is clear is that in seeking these arrest warrants the prosecutor adopted an unfair process and ignored the clear limits on the ICC’s jurisdiction, which does not extend to Israeli citizens.

    Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, and Palestine, which is not a state, cannot cede criminal jurisdiction over Israelis to the ICC, not least since in agreeing the Oslo Accords it disavowed any such jurisdiction.

    The prosecutor’s many failings were spelled out by an expert panel of lawyers meeting at Policy Exchange last month. The failings include the prosecutor’s apparent misunderstanding of the Law of Armed Conflict and his indifference to the fundamental principle of complementarity, which means that the ICC only has a role when domestic legal remedies are effectively unavailable.

    As we now know, South Africa received a massive financial lifeline from Iran and Qatar – two regimes notorious for their hostility toward Israel and support for Hamas – just after filing their case against the Jewish state.

    Meanwhile these international organisations continue in their particular targeting of Israel, while ignoring much greater injustices elsewhere….

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