Author: Mick Hartley

m the pluralistic liberal tradition that made it a great newspaper, thanks to its capture by – or its morally fuddled editorial cadre – surrender to, an activist, ideological, anti-Western and more than that, anti-factual front.
Our liberal democracy needs institutions of pluralistic discourse like this once-hallowed paper but it also requires a respect for facts and some sense of morals. Facts were once the essential ingredients of the coverage of a paper like the Guardian.
However at least there are comedic sides to this.
Two recent articles exemplify the Guardian’s embrace of illiberal anti democratic, anti fact forces and at the same time represent “a bonfire of the vanities” (an appropriate quotation from Savonarola who used the phrase to launch a bloodspattered but absurdly self-righteous purge of Florence that ended with his own execution.)
Today’s was a truly creepy review of the One Day in October documentary, by a comedy-writer Stuart Jeffries, on the October 7 Hamas massacres who seemed irritated and uneasy that the real record of the atrocities by Hamas and some Gazan civilians, gleefully documented by the killers themselves on GoPros and smart-phones, did not accord with his and the Guardian’s political prejudices.
How could these impertinent film-makers present these killers, decapitators, rapists, body-mutilators, corpse-abusers, kidnappers and looters as baddies? That is against the simplistic, rigid, flimsy framework of the ideology of anti-Israeli decolonization and must be wrong! This uncomfortable fact must be corrected!
The result: a piece of unintentional, amoral gallows comedy at the Guardian's expense.
The other was equally embarrassing and morally tone-deaf: a comically self-important and self-reverential but ugly and historically ignorant essay claiming the Israelis were guilty of memoralizing their October 7 fallen (so unlike every society, ever, in history from the 300 of the Spartans to the West with WW1 Armistice Day, the West and Russia with WW2, The Holodomor by Ukrainians, the Holocaust by the Jews, the Nakba by Palestinians, 9/11 by Americans and so on) by the clumsy Canadian provocateur Naomi Klein, all but indistinguishable from her alter-ego and fellow solipsist the other Naomi. As I posted this amidst general contempt for these pieces across the X platform, the paper may have taken one of them down 'pending review.'
The fact is the paper has lost its heart and soul and sense of moral judgement but these preposterous pieces at least provide a sort of bleak, EndDays comedy amidst the heartbreaking civilian losses of Middle Eastern conflicts… @theguardian

nt-size: 11pt”>Yifat Bitton, president of Achva Academic College in Southern Israel, a law professor, and an advocate for women’s rights, has spoken of the “deafening silence” she encountered from activists abroad who work on issues of sexual assault: “Unwillingness to listen to Israeli women victims because they are on the occupying side is simplistic and shocking. . . . This is a progressive argument that is completely regressive.” Such left-wing antisemitism has forced many American Jews, the great majority of whom identify as liberal, to confront hatred in a much more direct way, often among ostensibly close friends and colleagues….

Looking for historical analogies in times of crisis is inevitable, yet if many of them fall short, it may be a sign that we are truly now in uncharted territory. Basic assumptions about the modern Jewish experience have been called into question, both the Zionist belief in the security offered by political sovereignty in Israel and the diasporic belief in bedrock American tolerance.

A year after the Hamas massacre and the ensuing war, we may be standing at an inflection point whose significance we cannot yet grasp.

ologist, and I’m pretty sure that whatever you can think of, there exists both an example and a counter-example somewhere in nature,” McLysaght said in a 2020 social media post.

Exactly. Scientists in evolutionary genetics are generally intelligent people who understand biology and know that changing sex is an impossibility – but there are counter-examples.

In 2022, responding to a proposed US law that would seek to prevent transgender biological males from competing in women’s sports, McLysaght described the proposal as a “brutal manifestation of transphobia.”

“1. Transwomen are women. 2. The origin of sex-differentiated sports is not to protect women’s sports but to marginalise them. 3. This law is a brutal manifestation of transphobia”, she said….

Responding to a now-deleted post featuring a headline from the UK that read “Women-only facilities will be protected,” McLysaght said “What does it mean to ‘protect’ women-only facilities? Who decides who gets in, and on what basis? Hairstyle? Clothing? This is bullshit designed to hurt trans people and hurts us all.”…

In a statement on the appointment this week, Science Minister Patrick O’Donovan said he was grateful to have Professor McLysaght advising the government on scientific issues, because it is “essential” that the government has “the best scientific evidence available” when addressing modern challenges, “fully informed by quality science advice.”

Ah, that old Irish sense of humour….

style=”font-size: 11pt”>"…A diehard humanist who wanted to believe that man is not a predator to other men. The October 7 massacre, and the subsequent surge of anti-Israel propaganda have tarnished our hopes that Danny's murder would mark a turning point in the history of man inhumanity to man. But the steady regrouping of the world's conscience around Israel is now restoring our hope."

Daniel Pearl (October 10, 1963 – February 1, 2002) was an American journalist who worked for The Wall Street Journal. On January 23, 2002, he was kidnapped by Islamist militants while he was on his way to what he had expected would be an interview with Pakistani religious cleric Mubarak Ali Gilani in the city of Karachi.

After telling the camera that he and his family were Jewish, his subsequent decapitation was filmed…

Hurricane Milton? Pah! See what we have to endure here in north London:

Winds of 325 mph. Probably best to stay indoors.

[See here]

It's not just arms that North Korea is supplying to Russia in its war on Ukraine. Soldiers too:

North Korean soldiers supporting the Russian invasion have been killed in occupied parts of Ukraine, the government in Kyiv has said, confirming the strengthening relationship between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un.

A security official in the Ukrainian government was responding to speculation by South Korea’s defence minister that North Korean troops could soon be sent to fight in Ukraine.

“It has already sent them,” said Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation….

Last week, the Kyiv Post quoted unidentified intelligence sources saying that six North Koreans had been among 20 soldiers killed by a Ukrainian missile in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, and that three more were wounded.

Ukraine’s Channel 24 television said that the strike on October 3 hit a training camp for the North Korean soldiers.

It quoted an adviser to the Ukrainian mayor-in-exile of Mariupol, a city besieged and taken by Russia in 2022. Pyotr Andryushchenko said he had received information that North Korean shells were being brought into the port of Mariupol, that North Koreans were “systematically appearing” in the city and that they were “causing problems for locals”….

Western intelligence sources said last week that half the shells used by Russia — or about three million a year — were being supplied by North Korea. At the beginning of the year Ukrainian intelligence was playing down Kim’s contribution to Russia’s war, claiming that half the shells supplied were duds.

But last month the Ukrainian intelligence chief, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, said North Korea had become Putin’s biggest supplier of arms.

The Guardian review of last night's One Day in October on Channel 4:

This disturbing documentary about the attack on Be’eri kibbutz is full of troubling interviews and phone/CCTV footage. Sadly, it also demonises Gazans as either killers or looters.

I think they kind of demonised themselves. All that shooting and killing and looting. 

If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though, One Day in October won’t help. Indeed, it does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters, asset-stripping the kibbutz while bodies lay in the street and the terrified living hid.

Camera footage from a 4×4, time-stamped 8.01am, includes audio from hysterically excited unseen terrorists as they race to join the killing spree. “It’s time for the nation of Jihad! … I swear to God! … We’ll slaughter them! … I wanna livestream this! We’ve got to show the folks back home!” A comrade assures the speaker they already are: Hamas massacred Israelis for viewers in real time.

Despite such evident evil, I am reminded of Cy Endfield’s film Zulu, with its nameless hordes of African warriors pitted against British protagonists with whom we were encouraged to identify. TV and cinematic narratives often work as othering machines in this way. At its worst, One Day in October, if unwittingly, follows the same pattern.

But Zulu was a film. This was a documentary. This actually happened. No fake footage. No heroic Michael Caine or Stanley Baker. Just terrified Israelis, watching helplessly as their comrades and loved ones were slaughtered in cold blood – to much rejoicing from the Hamas brethren.

Dave Rich:

This Guardian review is a typical example of the liberal misconception that the worse Hamas atrocities become, so the more legitimate their grievances must be. As if there’s something wrong with sympathising with an Israeli child cowering in fear rather than the terrorists coming to kill her.

Update: article now "removed…pending review".

Students for Justice in Palestine, Monday:

Boston University SJP today: pic.twitter.com/1H3RyH4yzA

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) October 7, 2024

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Jerry Coyne:

There’s no more pretense among these protestors of supporting Palestine in general, or of “we’re just criticizing Netanyahu”. Their goal is to support Hamas and Hezbollah and the aims of these terrorists: to kill Jews and eliminate the Jewish state.  Here we have Americans, living in a land that prizes democracy, liberty, and equal rights, siding with terror groups that are murderous, misogynistic, and theocratic. It’s baffling.

Mark Feldon at Spiked:

Large sections of the left are increasingly positioning themselves as defenders of radical Islam, while the political establishment is either unwilling or unable to confront the new wave of anti-Semitism. We are witnessing the early stages of something deeply sinister.

This is Turkish occupied Kurdistan.

In 2015, Turkey massacred thousands of Kurdish civilians and forcibly displaced 500,000 Kurds. Entire Kurdish villages and cities were bombed into oblivion.

Nobody condemned Turkey. Nobody marched for Kurds. pic.twitter.com/fh1oWe98Yx

— ‌Himdad Mehristani (@Mehristani) October 8, 2024

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From the latest Private Eye, issue 1634: