Author: Mick Hartley

e for her beautiful learning-disabled daughter (I know her daughter’s beautiful, because I met her, too). In part, this mother wrote: “The material reality of a man is not changed by how he perceives himself, and telling vulnerable women and girls to ignore their own discomfort to accommodate a man’s perception of himself, is gaslighting.”

I cannot vote for any politician who takes issue with that mother’s words.

If you choose to prevaricate and patronise rather than address her concerns, if you continue to insist that the most vulnerable must embrace your luxury beliefs, no matter the cost to themselves, I don’t trust your judgment and I have a poor opinion of your character.

An independent candidate is standing in my constituency who’s campaigning to clarify the Equality Act.

Perhaps that’s where my X will have to go on July 4. As long as Labour remains dismissive and often offensive towards women fighting to retain the rights their foremothers thought were won for all time, I’ll struggle to support them. The women who wouldn’t wheesht didn’t leave Labour. Labour abandoned them.

and in recent months, despite officials disputing the numbers.

The same BBC Arabic service journalist, Sally Nabil, liked a tweet endorsing the words of a released Israeli hostage who expressed her “deepest gratitude” to Hamas for her treatment.

Along with several colleagues, Ms Nabil was exposed by The Telegraph in October for liking a comment to a video showing trucks loaded with dead Israelis and kidnapped civilians on October 7.

BBC bosses subsequently said they were “urgently investigating”, but they have not said what disciplinary action was taken.

Corporation insiders said that despite frequent official reminders to maintain due impartiality on social media, in reality senior executives have taken no action when it comes to bias in the context of Israel.

“Senior executives know about these tweets and are simply letting them sit there,” one said.

Has any action been taken since? Well…no. Sally Nabil is currently reporting for BBC Arabic on the Hajj heat deaths.

Former BBC director of BBC Television Danny Cohen in today's Telegraph – The BBC has given up any pretence of impartiality:

The real question here is why, eight months later, Ms Nabil is still working for the BBC, her salary paid for by us all as licence-fee payers. But she is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself.

The fundamental issue is the failure of the BBC’s most senior executives to get a grip on anti-Israel bias and anti-Semitism in the organisation. In this case, it seems clear that senior BBC management have made the decision that it is acceptable for staff to endorse a racist massacre without any impact on their employment. Given these circumstances, how on earth can Britain’s Jewish community believe that the BBC’s leadership takes anti-Jewish racism seriously and is determined to stamp it out? …

So here are some questions that senior BBC management should take the trouble to answer directly:

How does the BBC justify employing a journalist who has shown support for the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust?

Where would the BBC draw the line, in terms of the enthusiasm journalists would need to display before they are deemed to be an unsuitable member of staff?

Why do BBC managers believe that Sally Nabil is able to maintain due standards of impartiality when her anti-Israel views are causing such great offence?

And finally, if an employee’s prejudice was instead directed at the black or Muslim community, would BBC executives be so seemingly cavalier?

The BBC’s repeated claims that they take issues of anti-Jewish racism seriously are made a mockery of by cases like Ms Nabil. Unfortunately, a pattern has emerged, and it is hard to see it ending any time soon.

“padding-left: 40px”>“The orders noted that when provincial branches of the United Command and police departments and state security bureaus release information about new cases, they are essentially shooting themselves in the foot. These law enforcement agencies were severely criticized for failing to do their jobs.” …

Law enforcement agencies should establish the following guidelines for video recordings: They should focus on educational value, omit all details of the offense, and relate the offenders’ corrupt behavior to universally relatable situations.

“The unified command hopes this will prevent North Koreans from being exposed to foreign media and educate them more effectively. It also said that preventing people from being ideologically tainted and corrupted by outside influences will preserve the socialist system and ensure that young people in particular remain staunch supporters of the ‘our state-first’ ideology,” the source said.

Yes it's censorship all the way down, in a country where, as I've noted often enough before, there is no culture outside "our state-first ideology", aka Kim worship.

Why is it so hard for people to understand something so simple? Protesting outside of Jewish day school in LA, while shouting for Jewish families to “Go back to Germany,” does not resemble anything CLOSE to activism. It’s antisemitism in its purest form. pic.twitter.com/DVrmmosmZ3

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) June 21, 2024

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

"Go back to Germany". Jesus.

ifesto pledges, we learnt that the Labour leader puts “country first, party second”, believes in “action not words”, wants to “return politics to public service”, and is aiming for a “decade of national renewal, fixing the fundamentals”. On “day one, sleeves rolled up”, he plans to “hit the ground running”.

Is there any there there? He's undoubtedly someone with a firm grasp of the political cliche, but as for policies – "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them… well, I have others." All will no doubt be revealed in due course.

is, or maybe he doesn't like women who make life difficult for him by pointing out, correctly, that he's been taking the wrong side on this debate.

Ignore the silly women: we sensible men have it all in hand.

That Pride London poster:  a letter to Sadiq Khan from the LGB Alliance's Kate Barker:

[Click to enlarge]

Maya Forstater at UnHerd on her Met Police saga:

Last year I was threatened with arrest and called into Charing Cross Police Station to be questioned for the offence of “malicious communications”, a crime with a penalty of up to two years in prison. 10 months later, I remain under investigation.

The police questioned me about a tweet I had posted concerning a transgender GP, Dr Kamilla Kamaruddin, who I had claimed “enjoys intimately examining female patients without their consent”.

Did I mean to target a member of the transgender community, the police asked me. Did I understand that my tweet could be perceived as transphobic? Did I have any remorse? “Do you have any evidence that Dr Kamarudding examines her patient without consent?” the officer demanded.

The answer to this question was in the tweet itself, which linked to a blog post I wrote in 2020. The police did not appear to have read it. There, I set out the clear evidence from numerous media articles in which Dr Kamaruddin boasts of intimately examining female patients while not being clear and honest about his being male. He expresses happiness at now being able to perform “more intimate examinations that they did not let me do when I was a male GP”, and in the post I asked why the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the regulator that inspects GP clinics, said nothing about Dr Kamaruddin’s behaviour or the clinic’s policy of telling patients he was female.

Nothing I said came anywhere near the threshold required for “malicious communication”; more importantly, it was all true. But the Metropolitan Police is currently unequipped to treat women like me fairly. As with many police forces and the Crown Prosecution Service, it has been trained by Stonewall as part of the Diversity Champions Scheme, and so has been exposed to the doctrinal falsehood that anyone who refuses to pretend that men who identify as women are really female as bigots and transphobes.

Exactly so.  And instead of an investigation into the trans doctor, it's the whistle-blower who's targeted.

This line should be drawn long before a woman is told to take her clothes off in front of a man and required to call him “she” as he puts his fingers inside her body. But as far as I know, no one in the East One Health Centre, local NHS Commissioning Group, CQC or Royal College of GPs said no to Dr Kamaruddin. No one in the media noticed his behaviour, even when he spelled it out for them repeatedly. The police did not ask him to present himself to a police station to answer questions.

When a male doctor publicly boasted of intimately examining female patients without their informed consent, the only person whom the Metropolitan Police saw fit to investigate was a woman who pointed it out. The whole state apparatus meant to safeguard women from such abuses has now been turned against those of us who stand up against them.

le Europeans instilled the notion that their subjects were “different” from them, Russians conquered using another device: “sameness.” In the Russian colonial system, which was subsequently refined by the Soviets, subjects were banned from speaking their language or celebrating their culture (outside of the sterilized version of a culture that was sanctioned by Moscow). In exchange, they were allowed to rise to the top….

Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko is among the most prolific voices when it comes to comparing Russian and Western colonial styles. He is also the one who first introduced me to the idea of “sameness” as an instrument of domination. The message of Western colonialism was: “ ‘you are not able to be like us’, while the message of Russian colonialism was ‘you are not allowed to be different from us,’ ” he explained at the Zeg Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi in 2023. While there were differences in the way the Russians and the Europeans constructed their empires, the result was the same: violence, redrawn borders, repression of cultures and languages, and annihilation of entire communities.

The idea of “sameness as an instrument of domination” also explains why most well-meaning Russians I meet often seem weirdly unaware of their country being perceived as a colonial master. There are, of course, notable exceptions, but for the most part even the most liberal Russians I know seem utterly disinterested in engaging on the issue of colonialism with the country’s former subjects like myself.  Soon after the Ukraine invasion, I asked a prominent liberal Russian journalist whether he was going to introduce the topic of colonialism to his equally liberal, Russian audiences. He seemed genuinely insulted by the suggestion. “We are not colonialists!” he said. 

One reason why the debate about colonialism is largely missing from the Russian liberal discourse is because Russia is still missing from the debate about colonialism in the West. Yermolenko believes that when it comes to colonialism, the Western intellectual elite went from one extreme in the 19th century to another in the 21st. “They went from saying, ‘we are the best and no one can compare to us’ to saying, ‘we were the worst and no one can compare to us,’ ” Yermolenko says. 

Georgian historian Lasha Bakradze takes the argument a step further: “At the heart of this inability to understand, accept and analyze other forms of colonialism lies, paradoxically, the West’s own colonial mentality. This is where skeletons of Western colonialism are really buried.” 

For two decades, these self-imposed limits of Western debate about colonialism have given the Kremlin an enormous propaganda advantage, enabling Putin to position Russia as an anti-colonial power, and himself as the champion of all victims of European colonialism. They have also shaped our own, self-imposed, compartmentalized frameworks through which we understand oppression. 

It's not just Russia that's escaped any post-colonial reckoning. As I've noted before, Arab imperialism seems to get a free pass – and now, with cries of "Zionist imperialism", they're the greatest victims ever for the Free Palestine crowd, even as Arab militias continue their genocidal assault on black Africans in Darfur.

ir, they must be a boy; if they put on a dress, they become a girl. Realising that sex is constant and cannot be changed has long been understood to be an important developmental stage. Children who have not yet reached it will of course be more receptive to the idea that someone such as Pips Bunce is a woman on some days, a man on others, depending on hair and clothing choices.

Most adults do not think this because most adults grow up. Even those who believe there is such a thing as being born in the wrong body do not generally think that this can be solved by one trip to Toni & Guy (they tend to opt for full-on medical scandals instead). Yet recently I’ve noticed that there are some people who have drifted into adulthood still unaware that having a haircut isn’t magic. It is incredibly strange.

If a young female celebrity has short hair, there’s a good chance she won’t be identifying as a woman. Countless articles recommend “non-binary haircuts to embrace your gender identity”, while Apple’s “non-binary” emojis are nothing more than random people with medium-length hair. In one TikTok video, an obviously female person with a nice pixie cut seeks to defy the imaginary “Karens trying to kick [her] out of the toilet” due to her apparent androgyny. Even if we are assured that “gender begins with one’s soul or one’s interior life before it manifests itself into a haircut”, this really feels like a long-winded way of saying “certain ways of presenting are not usually for girls”. We are witnessing a new conservatism, one that is only reinforced by those who consider themselves super-rebellious for tinkering at the edges….

It's weirdly regressive is what it is. Childish sexist stereotypes dressed up as progressive.

Changing your appearance doesn’t change your sex, and if people judge you for looking “less feminine”, it is because they notice your sex, not because they don’t. The sad thing is, feminism already had the solution to this. It is better to think like a feminist than a child.