Author: Mick Hartley

– can you guess? – Palestine, or, more specifically, campaigning against Israel. Their main complaint against Baillie Gifford, which – until FFB had its way – supported most book festivals in the UK, was that it had a tiny amount of investment in companies connected to Israel.

If you had any doubt of the clod-hopping, philistine stupidity of Fossil Free Books and all who travel on its dead-end coattails, Jeremy Corbyn has been cheering it on, tweeting triumphally after Barclays withdrew its funding for UK music events, “We will continue to demand all arts festivals stand on the side of humanity and peace.”

Ah yes, because there’s nothing that screams “war-mongering genocide” more loudly than, say, a music festival in a London park on a summer’s evening. Still, it must be hard for Jeremy to care about the arts when his cultural hinterland begins with regular appearances on Russian TV and ends with similar gigs on Iranian TV. Thank God he’s taken a stand against that true cultural evil: British book festivals….

A lot of this has to do with – as I said – narcissism: idiots who cannot fathom the idea that their issues are totally irrelevant to other people’s issues, and maybe the Israeli-Hamas conflict has actually nothing in common with, say, a middle class life in Brighton. Ignorance is part of it, of course, in that these people are totally ignorant of all Middle East history, but that’s really down to narcissism, because if they weren’t such raging narcissists they’d read something other than their own tweets, the online version of masturbation.

But really, this is about conspiracy theories. For the past decade, progressives have been obsessed with finding a single source for all oppression. For a while it was “patriarchy.” Then it was “white supremacy.” For the hardcore there was “heteronormative cis supremacy.” And now it’s “Zionism.”

But history doesn’t work in single, simple ways, alas. It would be so much easier if it did, but it doesn’t, and part of growing up is learning this fairly basic truth. You can resist it if you like, and reside in a state of arrested development, clinging with your fingernails to the fatberg Omnicause, but don’t kid yourself that you’re doing any good. All you are, really, is a crank and a conspiracy theorist.

1 km north of the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) in the western, eastern, and central fronts.

Recently, an incident occurred where about 10 North Korean soldiers crossed 50 meters into our territory on the central front, likely related to the barrier construction. North Korea is also laying military roads to connect the barrier to frontline units and planting additional mines north of the MDL. If barriers and mines are added to the barbed wire along the armistice line, the North and South will be completely separated….

In late 2020, Kim Jong-un enacted the ‘anti-reactionary thought law’ to block the Korean Wave (Hallyu). The law states that those who watch or distribute S. Korean dramas will be executed, even specifying to ‘break their spines to death.’

He fears that admiration for South Korea could destabilize the Kim family’s hereditary rule. Defectors who attempted to go to S. Korea or had contact with S. Koreans or churches were sent to political prison camps or summarily executed. To prevent North Korean residents from escaping, Kim Jong-un sealed the entire 1,400 km North Korea-China border with barbed wire.

The North Korean MZ generation, known as the ‘Jangmadang (market generation),’ is different from previous generations. Having experienced that it is the market, not the Workers’ Party, that feeds them, therefore they do not unconditionally obey Kim Jong-un’s authority.

Currently, 500,000 to 600,000 MZ generation North Koreans are serving at the armistice line. If loudspeaker broadcasts to North Korea resume, frontline North Korean soldiers will inevitably be exposed to the Korean Wave and external information. Considering the structure of the North Korean regime, information from the free world is far more threatening than American missiles. The barrier at the armistice line is primarily to prevent the defection of ‘MZ’ North Korean soldiers.

East Germany built the Berlin Wall in 1961 but could not stop the influx of information from the free world. When internal dissatisfaction and contradictions exploded, the wall collapsed in an instant. The same could happen in North Korea.

Ca. 1900. "Man and boy fishing with cane pole from shore." American pastoral, with a definite Huck Finn vibe:

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]

From MEMRI TV:

Sheikh Dr. Ali Ahmed said in a Friday, June 7, 2024 sermon at the Islamic Center of Connecticut that Muslims should address LGBT subjects from a position of superiority, authority, and confidence, and not from a position of inferiority, because their values are 100% pure and given by Allah. He criticized Muslim parents who assume cartoons are harmless and allow their children to watch them unmonitored, asserting that the cartoons indoctrinate children with pro-LGBT values, and he commented that the LGBT agenda is the most "intolerant, aggressive, and criminal agenda there is today." He also said that the liberal left promotes gender-affirming surgery – which he described as disfigurement and mutilation – while condemning Islam for its well-established practice of female circumcision.

Well, he's got a point.

039;re ACTUALLY the opposite sex (and thus, "straight"). So a masculine butch lesbian is told she's ACTUALLY a man. And since she's now a man attracted to women – voila! – through the magic of trans alchemy, we have successfully converted a butch lesbian into a "straight" man. Again, I'm surprised this needs to be said, but medically converting young gay teens into their "straight" counterpart is hella homophobic.

To sum up: Gender ideology seeks to roll back LGB rights by making it impossible for homosexuals to define themselves, and then it sterilizes and mutilates gender non-conforming gay teens in an impossible attempt at medically converting them to their straight counterpart. Humans cannot change sex, we ALL know this (even the ones pretending that they don't) and we are destroying thousands of people's lives when we pretend to believe these hateful lies.

A better question is, how can you NOT see this ideology as homophobic to its core?

ot separate the civilian from the military. And that applies not only to the buildings, but also to the personnel in the buildings. The Israeli army was forced into this trap in its response to October 7. Not lured, but forced. Forced to defend itself and to make itself guilty by destroying the infrastructure with all the civilian victims. And it is precisely this inevitability that Hamas wanted and is exploiting. Since then, it has been directing the news that goes out to the world. The sight of suffering disturbs us daily. But no war reporter can work independently in Gaza. Hamas controls the selection of images and orchestrates our feelings. Our feelings are their strongest weapon against Israel. And by selecting the images, it even manages to present itself as the sole defender of the Palestinians. This cynical calculation has paid off…

I lived in a dictatorship for over thirty years [Romania – MH] And when I came to Western Europe, I could not imagine that democracy could ever be called into question in such a way. I thought that in a dictatorship, people are systematically brainwashed. And that in democracies, people learn to think for themselves because the individual counts. Unlike in a dictatorship, where independent thought is forbidden and the forced collective trains people. And where the individual is not a part of the collective, but an enemy. I am appalled that young people, students in the West, are so confused that they are no longer aware of their freedom. That they have apparently lost the ability to distinguish between democracy and dictatorship…

But yes, read it all.

nder on Instagram for Pride month.

It said there was an “anti-rights movement” which was seeking to “falsely portray the rights of LGBTQ+ people as competing with women’s rights”.

UN Women added: “Some try to frame the human rights of transgender people as being at odds with women’s rights.

“For instance, asserting that trans women pose a threat to the rights, spaces and safety of cisgender women.”

UN Women is charged with working for gender equality and the empowerment of women.

Ha! 

Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at Sex Matters, said: “It’s a sad day when UN Women lectures women’s rights campaigners on the need to include men with transgender identities in our work.

“Labelling the grassroots campaigners and groups who are defending women’s rights against a global tidal wave of gender-identity ideology as an ‘anti-rights movement’ is outrageous.

“There is simply no way to defend the claim that trans rights don’t compete with women’s rights, so UN Women had to resort to conflating the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people with those of people who claim a gender identity in order to make its point.

“UN Women’s claim that campaigners are ‘putting lives at risk’ has been refuted time and time again — this is dangerous and irresponsible propaganda.”

UN Women faced criticism for its response to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, for failing to condemn alleged gender-based war crimes adequately.

It also waited seven weeks before issuing any statement of condemnation of sexual violence.

That's all you need to know really. Carrying on the proud UN tradition of being always and inevitably on the wrong side.

Remember who UN Women picked as their UK Champion back in January? That parody of a woman Munroe Bergdorf –  fabulous decolletage, a load of slap, sexy dress, long hair, but, still, always….a man. 

Also, as they told us last October: "Remember, trans lesbians are lesbians too. Let's uplift and honour EVERY expression of love and identity! Happy International #LesbianDay! "

Well worth watching.

Antisemitism researcher Monika Schwarz-Friesel speech on May 3, 2024 at the Austrian Parliament on the occasion of the 79th anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp. 

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIWL7pWuEHA&w=550&h=309]

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[Images © Zupagrafika]

Daniel Ben-Ami at Spiked – The chilling rise of the Hamas red triangle:

Earlier this week, inverted red triangles were daubed on the New York home of Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum. Alongside the ominous symbols was a banner that stated: ‘Anne Pasternak / Brooklyn Museum / White Supremacist Zionist.’ Underneath, in a smaller red font, were the words, ‘funds genocide’. The homes of other Brooklyn Museum board members were also daubed with red triangles.

This act of gross anti-Semitic intimidation – Pasternak herself is Jewish – appears to be a follow-up to last month’s large anti-Israel demonstration outside the Brooklyn Museum. Protesters demanded that the museum condemn the killing of Palestinians in Gaza, disclose its financial ties to Israel and start divesting from the Jewish State.

When used by Hamas, the red triangle essentially denotes that someone is being targeted for execution. It first started using this symbol last November in propaganda videos produced in Gaza. In these, the red triangle was marked on Israeli soldiers or armoured vehicles about to be attacked. Since Hamas started promoting the symbol, it quickly began appearing throughout the Arab world, on everything from children’s comic strips to social-media memes. In the latter, it often appears over images of Israeli soldiers or the Star of David.

Now this repulsive glorification of violence against Israeli targets has been adopted by anti-Israel protesters in the West. As the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil-rights group, has noted, students at the New School, Emerson College and New York University ‘have all advertised their [Gaza solidarity] encampments using inverted red-triangle imagery’.

The echoes of the Thirties are clear, and deliberate.