Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • Return of the Flying Bats

    More on the all-conquering Flying Bats, the women's football team in Sydney that includes five men. From Reduxx:

    An Australian “trans inclusive” Premier League women’s football team with five male players has secured victory in the grand final match after dominating games throughout the summer. During the 2024 season of the North West Sydney Football Women’s Premier Competition, The Flying Bats won all 17 games and scored 76 goals while only a total of 8 points were scored against them.

    The Flying Bats, a football club for “self-identified women and non-binary people,” has attracted significant criticism that has escalated over the past year. The mounting outcry presumably motivated the decision by regulators to ramp up security measures during the Women’s Premier League grand final game on Sunday, which they won, 5-4, over West Pennant Hills Cherrybrook Football Club….

    Australian talk radio presenter Ben Fordham spoke with one of the attendees at yesterday’s match. According to the caller, identified only as David, security guards conducted bag checks and required all who attended to ditch their recording devices.

    “There was quite a high security presence up there, and… they were actually doing bag checks to make sure no one had brought in any sort of device to film the game any bigger than a mobile phone. I was told by security that they’d had to ask one person who refused to let them into their bag to leave the premises. So they were clamping down on people there trying to take footage… because The Flying Bats are a hot topic in football circles these days,” David said.

    “West Pennant had a really vocal crowd up there… At the end of the game, when the full-time whistle went, you should have heard the boos coming from the West Pennant Hills crowd section. It was deafening,” he added.

    Well, it's what women's sport is all about: giving second-rate men the chance to feel good about themselves.

  • Let Us Exist

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  • The band of zealots at the top of the BMA

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    BMA chair Philip Banfield solemnly declared it was time to “truly listen to this group of important, valued, and unfortunately often victimised people”, urging medical professionals to take their lead from distressed young patients rather than expert clinical guidance. He added that clinicians, patients, and families should be at the centre of an evidence-based decision-making process about their health rather than politicians.

    Imagine if Banfield had made a similar pronouncement about anorexic teens, declaring how important it was to listen to "this group of important, valued, and unfortunately often victimised people" who realise that they're horribly overweight and yet are being ignored by the medical profession. 

    In opting to ignore the science on puberty blockers, the BMA departs from its core purpose, which the leadership may need reminding is to champion the interests of its members, rather than the niche demands of transgender lobby groups. But Banfield’s certainty surpasses such petty concerns as clinical evidence; he and the band of zealots at the top of the BMA are drunk on their sense of moral rectitude. More concerningly, it seems they are happy to abdicate clinical judgement in favour of the feelings of the very confused teenagers they have a duty to protect.

    Doctors deserve better from those who purport to represent them. The BMA has not only failed members, it has abandoned the most basic tenet of the medical profession: “First do no harm”.

  • Beer wagon

    John Vachon, March 1943. "Charlotte, North Carolina. Beer wagon.":

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]

  • Intermission

    Off for a few days. Back Wed. 28th.

  • In Union Park

    The anti-Israel demo at the Democratic Convention in Chicago reaches its logical conclusion:

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  • Mere reproductive functions

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  • A ‘highly respected imam’

    nt-size: 11pt”>There appears to be no bounds to the ‘useful idiocy’ of the BBC when it comes to enemies of liberty.

    At the weekend, BBC Radio London presenter Asad Ahmad sought the counsel of Haitham al-Haddad, the chair of the Muslim Research and Development Foundation (MRDF), over the race riots which had just erupted across England. Haddad, if you are blissfully unaware, is a stalwart of the Islamist far right.

    Not that listeners would know this from Ahmad’s introduction. He referred to the Saudi-trained cleric as a ‘highly respected imam’. ‘Highly respected’ by whom exactly? Certainly not by anyone who supports secularism, democracy or human rights. After all, Haddad is a proponent of the regressive ideology of caliphism. He thinks that the UK is an ungodly society and should be replaced by an Islamic state with a system of Sharia governance.

    These views, drawn from fundamentalist Deobandi and Salafi doctrines, used to be a far-right fringe position among Muslim migrants in Britain. But thanks to financial support from Saudi Arabia and regional rivals Qatar and Iran, caliphism has gained broader purchase in the UK in recent decades. As Ed Husain notes in his 2021 book, Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain, ‘caliphism is anti-Western and seeks to subvert British culture, law and institutions from within’ and it’s being ‘embedded in speeches, sermons, books, websites and charities’.

    Evangelising Hate, a 2014 report from the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, provides an eye-opening portrait of the misogyny, intolerance and authoritarianism of Haddad and his ilk. According to the report, he thinks ‘a man should not be questioned’ by the authorities if he is found to have assaulted his wife because ‘they can sort out their matters among themselves’. A 2018 investigation by The Times quoted him as saying that women from Western countries who had committed adultery were ‘begging’ him to take them to an Islamic country in order to be stoned to death.

    What’s more, according to Evangelising Hate, Haddad ‘believes that criticising suicide bombing is wrong because to do so would be to “nullify” “defensive jihad”’. He says it is a duty of Muslims to engage in jihad and ‘fight everyone until they establish the law of Allah’. On the day of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom in Israel, he posted on Facebook a prayer for Allah to grant victory to ‘the people of truth in Gaza’ against ‘their oppressors’….

    It’s perplexing, isn’t it? It would be one thing for the BBC to invite Haddad on air to challenge his views. It is quite another to present him as a ‘highly respected imam’, supposedly the ideal man to calm things down after days of violent rioting. The presenter even asked him, ‘What is your advice to the media, what is your advice to politicians, what should they do?’.

    The riots show how society can violently fracture if communities lose trust in each other. Yet how can we rebuild that trust, that social cohesion, when the myopic BBC chooses to treat bigots like Haddad as fonts of wisdom?

    Perhaps "Islamophobic" articles like this will, soon enough, no longer be permissible.

  • Like Winston Smith in 1984

    istianity. The latter include street preacher Hatun Tash, who was lucky to escape with her life after a knife attack and a separate plot to buy a gun to murder her. In in a dark irony, her would-be assassin Edward Little was a convert to Islam….

    Farah, also 19, compared her situation as a secret apostate to that of Winston Smith in 1984: "I live in a very Muslim area and it's impossible to detect other ex-Muslims since you can't just go up to people and ask them if they're ex-Muslim.

    The process of finding other apostates in real life parallels 1984. It's like when Winston observes other characters looking for signs of 'unorthodoxy' that would prove that they're against the party. Maybe, that hijabi who is too passionate about women's rights is an apostate or that guy who attends every Friday prayer, you don't really know."

    And the consequences of getting it wrong, and outing yourself to the wrong person, could be disastrous.

    The latest challenge for apostate Muslims to face: the threat of new "Islamophobia" laws. 

    But by far the most dangerous threat on the horizon for ex-Muslims (and many other people besides) is the definition of 'Islamophobia' being advanced by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims. This definition, among other things, brands as Islamophobic anyone who makes "mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Muslims".

    How does that leave the ex-Muslim who draws a link between the treatment they suffered and the treatment suffered by tens of thousands of others? Would drawing an adverse inference about the entire religion from this overwhelming data be branded as Islamophobic on the basis of stereotyping? If translated into law, as seems possible under a new government, ex-Muslims' strident criticisms of Islam and elements of the Muslim communities they grew up in could well be criminalised as hate crimes.

    The definition would also prohibit "claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword". Which again, if translated into law, could easily criminalise Iranian dissidents who celebrate and mourn pre-Islamic Persia, or mainstream historians like Tom Holland who have written about the early Islamic conquests and the wars of Muhammad's followers against the Eastern Roman Empire. Indeed, the definition is so inimical to freedom of speech that it has united no two more disparate figures in opposition than one of religion's staunchest critics, Richard Dawkins, and Tim Dieppe of Christian Concern.

    Ex-Muslims are in the unenviable position of being canaries in the coal mine for the rest of us: if ex-Muslims cannot speak freely then none of us can. If they cannot criticise or satirise religion, nobody else is safe to. Their warnings should be heeded most urgently.

  • Burning the devil’s instruments

    struments.

    “They knocked on the door, and I saw them through the window. I told my family not to open it, but one of them climbed over the gate and jumped into the yard. He unlocked the door and five more officers stormed into the house,” he said.

    The police ransacked his house and discovered five guitars and several other instruments.

    The 31-year-old was then taken to a police station, where he said he had been severely beaten.

    “They were saying, ‘The foreigners are gone and you cannot live with the devil’s instruments any more,’” he said.

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