Author: Mick Hartley

investments in fossil fuels and companies “linked” to Israel. Other luminaries such as Charlotte Church and Nish Kumar have similarly backed “Fossil Free Books”, the cultural vandals masquerading as concerned global citizens.

Yet no matter how much one sympathises with the invidious position in which the book festival found itself, the decision to part ways with Baillie Gifford is both craven and pathetic. It is a shameful capitulation to scolds and nincompoops whose arguments — to accord them a status they scarcely warrant — collapse after just a few seconds of scrutiny.

The hypocrisy of these fools knows no bounds. Waterstones is Britain’s biggest bookshop and it is owned by Elliott Advisors, a hedge fund with extensive oil and gas interests. Yet all these authors objecting to Baillie Gifford seem content to allow Waterstones to sell their books. Nor have I noticed authors revolting against Amazon even though, in the weasel words of “Fossil Free Books” the world’s largest online retailer has “direct or indirect links to Israel’s defence, tech and cybersecurity industries”.

But then so, apparently, do companies such as the chip manufacturer Nvidia and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. By this standard pretty much anyone who uses the internet is “linked” to Israeli “genocide” and anyone with shares in any stock market tracker fund is doubtless doubly implicated.

It is of course, in that over-worked but useful phrase, virtue-signaling. There's a lot of it about.

Simon Schama:

Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens would have stood up to the protesters trying to silence debate at literary festivals, Simon Schama has said.

The Hay Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival have cut ties with sponsor Baillie Gifford after a campaign led by Fossil Fuel Books, which claimed that the asset manager invests in companies with links to Israel, as well as companies that contribute to the climate crisis.

Invoking his late friends, Schama told a Hay audience: “Book festivals are theatres for listening to each other. I don’t want to see festivals being trapped in some sort of purity test.

“I go back to dear friends. I’m going to the memorial service of my friend Martin Amis. Martin and Christopher Hitchens and Clive James and a lot of my friends who are not with us were absolutely committed never to have the hands of writers tied behind them.

“They were merry pugilists. They absolutely believed that you could disagree spectacularly with each other without requiring the silencing or worse of each other.

“That is the heart and soul of the Hay Festival and the other great festivals that we have in this country, and I don’t want to see them imperilled. All of you, along with me, have to stand up and fight for them.”

le=”padding-left: 40px”>“The extensive process also includes consulting with players, coaches, external agencies across government, the international federation and relevant groups.

“This will be concluded in the coming weeks with the view to release the policy in July.”

The default line in sports seems to be, yes fine, let the trans players play wherever they want: we must be fair to these lovely trans women, and it's only girls they're playing against anyway so it's not like it's a big deal. Then people – women – start objecting, it makes the news, and the people who run the sport say, ah yes, well you know, it's all terribly complicated, but, well, we're looking into it. Discussions are being coordinated. Of course it's not complicated at all – couldn't be easier: keep men out of women's sport. But they can't quite manage to see it…

pic.twitter.com/GHbOP3CsS7

— 🐦ALittleBird🐦 (@uglyspirit0) June 1, 2024

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font-size: 8pt”>[Photos © Dorothy Bohm Archive]

bings starting in April 1950 that resulted in a number of injuries and a few deaths. Two months before the expiration of the law, by which time about 85,000 Jews had registered, another bomb at the Masuda Shemtov synagogue killed 3 or 5 Jews and injured many others. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said was determined to drive the Jews out of his country as quickly as possible, and on August 21, 1950, he threatened to revoke the license of the company transporting the Jewish exodus if it did not fulfill its daily quota of 500 Jews.

And now:

In 2021 the Jewish population in Iraq number was fewer than five. In 2022 the number of living Jews in Iraq had shrunk to three.

op, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland etc. etc. did the trick. Plenty more refused to acknowledge a Kronstadt moment and went to their graves refusing to concede that there was so much as a flaw, let alone evil, in the great liberation.

My own Kronstadt – from an era when the Soviet god that failed had been replaced with a new deity in the form of decolonisation – was less an event than an idea, or rather the exposure of a dogma posing as an idea. I remember it with crystal clarity: the moment I read Judith Butler’s demand that we understand ‘Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left.’

I knew two things at that moment. First, that decolonisation and the campaigns for global justice had not themselves been delegitimised by such insanity, any more than the horrors of the Soviet Union had delegitimised socialism. Second, that while, like Jean Améry, I would be always of the left, I could henceforth play no part in any left that agreed with Butler, and that the rest of my life would in some way be spent engaged in an acrimonious dialogue with it.

Any more I have to give, from here on out will, in large part, be devoted to ensuring that the ‘this is what liberation looks like’ response to 7 October becomes this generation’s Kronstadt. […]

The road to this squalid reaction to 7 October has been a long one, with many a disastrous turn leading the far left into ever more dangerous and bankrupt territory. It is what happens when dogma becomes more fashionable than critical thought; when radicalism trumps reason; when the antidote to Orientalism is taken to be Occidentalism; when the counter to cultural imperialism is moral relativism; when it is ‘better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron’; when Foucault decides, for us all, that Iranian women and Iranian democrats can go to hell – the Ayatollah is, after all, just too damned exciting.

Yes, the present swamp was fed by myriad fetid tributaries. So too does it inevitably become more and more contaminated. Generations raised on blather masquerading as profundity and on nihilism masquerading as radical chic. This next generation has far exceeded Butler in both irrationality and the explicitness of its contempt for Israeli life.

Oh ffs. Woman, 70, in court over husband's death. It's a man:

A woman has appeared in court charged with the murder of her husband, who was found dead at their home in East Sussex.

Emergency services were called to a property in Lavender Street, Brighton, at about 19:30 BST on 27 May.

Joanna Rowland-Stuart, 70, was charged arrested and charged with killing Andrew Rowland-Stuart, also 70, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

Ms Rowland-Stuart appeared before magistrates in Crawley on Friday. She has been remanded in custody ahead of a hearing at Lewes Crown Court on 3 June.

The former transgender rep for the Civil Service's LGBT group Proud, 'Joanna' Rowland-Stuart, who made media appearances discussing violence against LGBT people, has been charged with murder, after his husband was found dead, killed by a samurai swordhttps://t.co/neDou9JUtl

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) May 31, 2024

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p style=”padding-left: 40px”>“However, a strategy of protest which results in EIBF being left without a principal sponsor will jeopardise its future: this would be a Pyrrhic victory, and merely deprive writers and activists of platform and influence.”

d, professional medical organisations, there is even less excuse. The job of medical institutions is in large part to remember the mistakes of history. These organisations should respond with care, consider evidence, uncertainty, and the recurrent tendency of well meaning medicine to do harm with good intentions. Popularity should be resisted over the need for evidence and caution. This requires strong leadership. Shutting down, or trying to shut down debate about serious clinical uncertainties—as has happened—is unacceptable.

This has not been helped by the multiple lobby groups, welcomed by many institutions to influence their policy making in this area. The same rules that we would normally use to guard relationships with any other pressure group—be it promoters of disease “awareness campaigns” or party politicians looking for support—seem to have dissolved against social pressure to achieve a compliance badge on a website.

The other explanation for what has happened that I think pertinent is this. Doctors, quite rightly, have been afraid to make the same mistakes as medicine did when homosexuality was treated as an illness in the 1950s. Then, electric shocks, desensitisation, hormones, and psychotherapy were attempted to be used to “treat” homosexuality—shamefully. What medicine did then was to intervene—ineffectively and harmfully—in something that was not a disease and should not have come under a medical purview. As Cass states, for most young people experiencing gender dysphoria, it is temporary; it is often associated with neurodiversity; it mainly resolves over time, and medical intervention does not benefit the majority. There is a comparison, but it is in favour of medicine backing off from prescriptions and surgery, and understanding why a phenomenon might be happening, why it is being seen in a medical context, and what is the best and least harmful way to respond to such expressed and profound distress.

An interesting comparison. In both cases – homosexuality and gender dysphoria – doctors felt obliged, in line with the social mores of the times, to intervene medically. This was shameful on both occasions. For homosexuality no intervention was required: just a change in the social mores. Gender dysphoria, on the other hand, was an extremely rare complaint until very recently. It's a social contagion, driven by the gender industry. Whatever the answers may be, they shouldn't involve immediate prescription of puberty blockers followed by hormone replacement therapy. At least, thanks to Cass, that much is now clear.

Dear university students in the United States of America, you are standing on the right side of history.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) May 29, 2024

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[And again: "Dear university students in the US, my advice to you is to become familiar with the Quran."]

Further proof, if proof were needed: at the People's Conference for Palestine on May 26 in Detroit (post yesterday): North Korea "has never once recognized the Zionist tumor that goes by the name of Israel." "PFLP founder George Habash received training in Pyongyang".

With Iran and North Korea on your side, all that's needed now is an endorsement from Putin. Case closed.