Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • The moral cowardice of Scottish MPs

    le=”font-size: 11pt”>To make matters worse Sharon Cowan, the queer legal studies professor, is in fact Sandy Brindley's partner.

    Meanwhile Brindley has been offering reporters the phone numbers of rape survivors who she thinks will support her.

  • Progressive Realism

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    This lengthy first post is in the personal style, telling us of his close bond with the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken: “Tony and I are good friends, who share a love of music and have a similar outlook on the world of today.” Nice to know. But when it gets into complex policy matters, something bizarre appears. Lammy rightly denounces Putin’s false claim to be “seeking to ‘liberate’ Ukrainian civilians” but then veers wildly into the Caucasus: “The states of central Asia look increasingly east and south. Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s … Only a few fragile regimes like Belarus, DPRK [North Korea] and Iran still align with Moscow.”

    To be clear, what the foreign secretary extols here is the completion of the capture of the area of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia by Azerbaijan. As Professor Mark Movsesian of St John’s University law school observed: “The foreign secretary’s reference to the ‘liberation’ of Nagorno-Karabakh is shockingly callous and ignorant. In fact, exactly a year ago Baku ethnically cleansed the region of 120,000 Christian Armenian inhabitants in violation of an order from the International Court of Justice.”

    And, as I wrote only last week, Azerbaijan is getting closer to Moscow, not further away: “President Aliyev and President Putin enjoy the best of relations. The Azeri leader welcomed the Russian to Baku in August, returning the hospitality he had received at the Kremlin four months earlier.” I also quoted Aliyev’s sinister remarks in a speech in 2022, which referred to ethnic Armenians as “barbarians and vandals” who “established a state for themselves in someone else’s land … Present-day Armenia is our land.”

    As one long-standing member of the Labour Party with appreciation of this dispute furiously WhatsApped me, referring to Lammy’s extraordinary blog: “The muppet’s chosen to back a kleptocratic dictatorship over a post-Soviet nascent democracy.”

    Lammy’s blundering intervention has not gone unnoticed in the US, where there is a large Armenian diaspora. The Democrat congressman Brad Sherman declared that “David Lammy’s comments on the Armenia crisis are a stain on UK foreign policy. He has endorsed ethnic cleansing.”

    Add this to the partial ban on UK arms sales to Israel – our supposed ally now engaged in an existential war against Islamist forces bent on its complete elimination – and the signs are, to put it mildly, not good.

  • Solidarity with Palestinians

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    "They are banned from working in 39 professions, including lawyers, doctors or engineers."

    Well, it perpetuates their refugee status and reinforces the idea that Israel, the "Zionist Entity", is just a temporary blip on the map that'll eventully be destroyed, and the refugees will return to their rightful home. 75 years since Israel was founded. All the other refugees from the great ethnic cleansings of the mid-20th century have long since settled – not least the Jews expelled from their homes across the Middle East and North Africa. Not the Palestinians though… 

  • In the English Gardens

    href=”https://mickhartley.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451ebab69e202dad0d10341200d-pi” style=”display: inline”>IMG_2495s
    Ent-(non-earthly delights), Libby Heaney

    IMG_2496s
    The Ghaf Tree, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim

    For more on the wonderful Leonora Carrington (second down) see here.

  • The view from Ireland

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  • “They cannot protect me because they do not want to offend a certain group of people”

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    Full text:

    Watch the shocking footage of her arrest, where the police, without establishing the facts, arrested and frog marched her through a baying crowd of Islamic men who abused and assaulted her.

    At the police station she was strip-searched, interrogated at 4am and held in a cell for 15 hours. Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, Hatun took legal action against the police and they have now settled the case for £10,000.

    Hatun, who is is a well-known Christian evangelist who regularly critiques and debates the Qur’an said: “The police have repeatedly taken away my rights and told me that they cannot protect me because they do not want to offend a certain group of people.

    “More must be done to properly deal with Islamic violence and intimidation at Speakers’ Corner. We don’t live in Pakistan; we don’t live in Saudi Arabia. I am Christian and by default I believe that Muhammad is a false prophet. I should be allowed to say that in the UK without being stabbed or repeatedly arrested.

    “I am concerned that power has been handed over to Muslim mobs on Britain’s streets, and that there is no coming back from this. “The British public urgently need and deserve better policing.”

    Hatun has given the settlement money to an organisation supporting individuals who decide to leave the Islamic faith and face persecution for doing so.

  • A sinister dystopian nightmare

    Hamas base themselves in hospitals and schools, using civilians as human shields, while Hezbollah have been indiscriminately bombing northern Israel for months, careless of where their missiles land. Israel, on the other hand, devised a plan that would target only Hezbollah members…

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  • Kinky boots

    ed to two years and four months in prison after being convicted of aggravated extortion and grievous bodily harm. At the time, the court also recommended he be confined to a permanent placement in a psychiatric institution after hearing expert testimony from a psychiatrist who labeled him dangerous and at risk of escalating his behavior to more serious acts of violence.

    But then along comes the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz.

    Germany’s new Self-Determination Act (SBGG) comes into effect in November. The law, which was met by overwhelming backlash from women’s rights campaigners, established “gender identity” as a protected characteristic and allows parents to change the sex marker on their children’s documents from birth. The SBGG also creates the potential for citizens to be fined up to €10,000 (approx. $11,500 USD) for revealing a person’s given name and birth sex without their permission – an action that trans activists staunchly oppose and refer to as ‘deadnaming.’

    The SBGG allows individuals to change their legal sex and name without any diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and does not discriminate against those with criminal records. Even convicted sex offenders such as rapists, pedophiles, exhibitionists and voyeurs can easily change their legal sex and first name at a registry office.

    Stopping trans foot-fetishists from being charged with exhibitionism may turn out for women to be the thin end of a very large and unwelcome wedge.

  • Lammy’s new gaffe

    g operation – in a recent Substack post. Lammy took to his blog to express his unsolicited musings about the Nagorno-Karabakh region, writing:

    "The states of Central Asia look increasingly east and south. Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s. Georgia and Moldova are engaging with Nato and [the] EU."

    Crikey. Talk about bad wording, eh? Mr S would remind readers that Azerbaijan has been locked in an ethnic and territorial conflict with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region – with concern growing after violence restarted in the region last year. Harrowing clips of Armenian civilians being beheaded have spread online, exposing the extent of the violence being carried out by Azerbaijani forces – making the Foreign Secretary’s choice of language all the more baffling.

    Now a prestigious professor has urged the Labour man to retract his comments, blasting them as ‘shockingly callous and ignorant’. Mark Movsesion fumed:

    "Exactly a year ago, Baku ethnically cleansed the region of its 120,000 Christian Armenian inhabitants in violation of an order from the International Court of Justice. Lammy seems to think Azerbaijan, like Ukraine, is trying to free itself from Russian domination. In fact, Azerbaijan and Russia are strategic partners, and Azerbaijan carried out the ethnic cleansing of Karabakh with Russian acquiescence."

    Meanwhile shadow foreign minister Alicia Kearns has called for the Foreign Secretary to clarify what he meant in his ‘vanity blog’, adding:

    "Words matter as Foreign Secretary, especially when opining on conflict.‬ Contradicting long standing UK policy in a vanity blog is totally inappropriate and throws into question the Foreign Secretary’s judgement. David Lammy needs to urgently clarify the Government’s policy on Nagorno-Karabakh. This is a serious matter – over 100,000 people have been displaced from their homes.‬"

    The man is way out of his depth. The first Labour minister to go? We'll see, but I wouldn't bet on it: he's well versed in playing the race card.

  • The vacuous narcissism of the trans movement

    I had a go yesterday. Now here's Jo Bartosch at Spiked on the fourth plinth farce:

    The lump of art unveiled this week on the Fourth Plinth couldn’t be more revealing. For the next 18 months, visitors who pass through Trafalgar Square will be confronted by a cube of 726 pseudo-death masks of ‘trans and nonbinary’ people.

    Each of the casts, moulded from volunteers in the UK and Mexico, face inward towards a void in the middle of the work. This perfectly encapsulates the vacuous narcissism of the trans movement, not to mention the stupidity of the establishment figures who prop it up with obscene amounts of taxpayer cash. In selecting this work, the fourth plinth judging panel has put a spurious cause quite literally on a pedestal.

    This was by no means the intended message. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles created the piece, titled Mil Veces un Instante, to commemorate Karla La Borrada. La Borrada was a trans-identified singer and male prostitute who, like many in Mexico’s sex industry, was tragically killed. Margolles uses her art to highlight the vulnerability of what she terms ‘the trans community’, a cause that arguably has more relevance to those selling sex on the streets of Mexico than to, say, whining nonbinary brats at British universities….

    Of course, according to the woke values of the British art establishment, this new installation ticks every box – the masks are, after all, of brown, poor, transgender sex workers. What judging panel could ask for more? Yet art that is chosen to further the patron’s preferred politics is sucked dry by the process. Granting awards and exhibition opportunities according to the right diversity criteria is the multimillion-pound equivalent of painting by numbers.

    Margolles offers something else the elites think is juicy, too – a tiresome, boundary-pushing edginess that has become a substitute for talent. As a pioneer of ‘corpse art’, Margolles’s studio in Mexico City adjoins a morgue. She even boasts of using fluids from the dead bodies brought in.

    …the choice of Margolles’s ghoulish monument to an overhyped threat points to a moribund future where shock triumphs over substance. In this, it is perhaps best understood not as a memorial to a murdered Mexican male prostitute, but rather as a memorial to the butchered British arts.

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