Author: Mick Hartley

  • The crime of being raped

    >Atefeh was convicted for crimes against chastity after being raped repeatedly by Ali Darabi, an 51-year-old ex-revolutionary guard turned taxi driver. Darabi was a married man with children at the time.

    Atefeh had been raped by Darabi over a period of 3 years without her family being aware. While in prison, she was further allegedly tortured and raped by prison guards. She told her grandmother that she could only walk on all fours because of the pain. The judge in her case was Haji Rezai. When Atefah realized that she was losing her case, she removed her hijab, an act seen as a severe contempt of the court, and argued that Ali Darabi should be punished, not her. She even removed her shoes and threw them at the judge. Rezai later sentenced her to death.

    According to the BBC, the documents presented to the Supreme Court of Appeal described her as 22 years old, but her birth certificate and death certificate stated that she was 16.

  • Enabling damage to women

    er women. The tribunal found that the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre constructively dismissed and harassed an employee, Roz Adams, after she realised that senior managers believed there is no such thing as biological sex, and expressed her concerns about the effect of that belief on traumatised women.

    Of course this happened in Scotland, where gender ideology is so embedded that the CEO of the centre is a trans-identified man. Mridul Wadhwa wasted no time in demonstrating his unsuitability for the job, suggesting in a notorious interview in 2021 that “bigoted” rape survivors should be re-educated about trans rights. But the full extent of his influence on the culture of the centre is exposed in the tribunal’s excoriating judgment.

    It found that Wadhwa and other members of the senior management team were on a “heresy hunt” when they began a disciplinary process against Adams. It concluded that Wadhwa’s intention was to “cleanse the organisation” of anyone who refused to accept views which were “at the very extreme end of gender identity theory”….

    The centre even refused to refer rape survivors who wanted a female counsellor to a women-only service set up by J.K. Rowling. This is about as far from a victim-centred approach as it is possible to imagine, turning what should have been a service for distressed women into an exercise to validate the fantasies of entitled men like Wadhwa.

    No woman, not even one who has been terrorised and beaten by a violent sex offender, is safe from the demands of these misogynists. They have got away with it because too many people have swallowed the big lie that men who “identify” as women are victims who need to be cosseted. Anyone who goes on believing it, after it’s been exposed so many times, is enabling damage to women.

    This would be bad enough anywhere, but that this trans takeover should happen at a rape crisis centre for god's sake -  it defies belief.

    Last word:

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  • The “protector of resistance movements”

    So farewell then, the Butcher of Tehran:

    The Islamic Republic's terror proxies Hamas and Hezbollah issued statements mourning Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday.

    Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and other officials were also killed in the crash in the country’s northwestern East Azerbaijan province.

    “These leaders supported the legitimate struggle of our people against the Zionist entity, provided valued support to the Palestinian resistance, and made tireless efforts in solidarity and support in all forums and fields for our people in the steadfast Gaza Strip during the Battle of Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas said, referring to the war it launched on October  7 when it led an assault on the northwestern Negev, killing, wounding and kidnapping thousands of civilians and soldiers.

    “They also made significant political and diplomatic efforts to stop the Zionist aggression against our Palestinian people,” the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate with close ties to the regime in Tehran added.

    Hezbollah, Iran's terrorist proxy in Lebanon, eulogized Raisi as a "protector of resistance movements."

    “Hezbollah in Lebanon extends its deepest condolences,” the group said, adding that the Iranian president was “a strong supporter, and a staunch defender of our causes … and a protector of the resistance movements.”

    Raisi, known as the “Butcher of Tehran” for his role in the 1988 executions of 30,000 political prisoners, was elected president in 2021. The hardline leader has repeatedly called for the destruction of the State of Israel.

    I trust the various Free Palestine student encampments will pause for a minute's silence in honour of the great man, who so ably embodied, and gave voice to, their own sentiments on the matter of the Zionist entity.

    Israel has denied involvement – though I doubt it'll make much difference to the inevitable accusations.

  • Changing gender under Labour

    he bit about "while protecting single sex spaces for biological women" is window-dressing nonsense. Easier self-ID and protecting single sex spaces are simply not compatible.

    Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said she would be concerned about “shifting sole responsibility for signing gender recognition certificates to GPs”.

    She said while the college supported improving care for patients with gender dysphoria “including tackling the long waits they face for treatment and ­services”, she added: “For most GPs, detailed management of gender dysphoria is outside of our area of expertise.”

    Badenoch said: “There is no reason whatsoever to relax the safeguards that are in place. [Labour] should stop trying to weaponise this issue and allow professionals to do their job properly.”

  • A heresy hunt

    tion undertaken by the centre into Adams’s opinions as “unfortunately a classic of its kind, somewhat reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka”.

    Ian McFatridge, the employment judge, identified Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman who is ERCC chief executive, as a key figure in an internal investigation that “should not have been launched in the first place”.

    McFatridge said the review “was clearly motivated by a strong belief among senior management and some of the claimant’s colleagues that the claimant’s views were inherently hateful”.

    He added: “It is clear that [Wadhwa] was involved in the process since she was the one who selected and ­contacted who would deal with the ­various stages of the disciplinary and grievance process.”…

    The tribunal, which has yet to decide on a settlement, heard that the dispute began when Adams spoke to colleagues about a rape victim who asked if her counsellor would be a “man or a woman” because she would feel “uncomfortable talking to a man”.

    It intensified when a non-binary member of the staff copied Wadhwa ­into an email chain.

    In evidence, it was revealed that Wadhwa had told a university event that the “best way” to get staff to support trans inclusion policies was to “fire them”.

    Helen Joyce, of the campaign group Sex Matters, said: “Sex-based boundaries matter for everyone, but most especially women who have experienced male violence and sexual assault. By standing up against the abusive management, Roz Adams has helped women across the UK.”

    Adams now works at Beira’s Place, a centre funded by the author JK Rowling, which ­offers a “sexual violence support ­service for women run by women”.

    Good luck to her.

    Also…

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  • Progressive Oregon

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  • A party of cranks

    der were needed that this defenestration was overdue, last week it became apparent that the party has purged itself of members who dared to suggest that “sex is a biological reality”.

    Members who signed a declaration to that effect last November have been ejected after complaints that tolerating such views risked making the party an unsafe place for its trans and non-binary members.

    “The welfare of all our members is our primary concern,” a Greens spokesperson said, and the miscreants who believe in the reality of biological sex were guilty of breaching the party’s membership policy. That policy may be summarised as: thou shalt not insist upon the truth. Science, which is settled on climate change, is mysteriously unable to reach a firm conclusion on the question of whether or not humans can change their sex.

    The rebel signatories further asserted that women have sex-based rights of association and organisation, that women should be free to discuss female issues “without being abused, harassed, or intimidated”, that sex-based protections “as set out in the Equality Act” should be maintained, that women are too frequently “subject to discrimination … on the basis of their sex”, and that lesbians “by definition” are “women who are same-sex attracted”.

    Since believing these things is now incompatible with membership of the Scottish Green Party we may posit that the Greens do not think lesbians are same-sex attracted, that women do not have sex-based rights and protections, that sex and gender are interchangeable and that sex is not, in fact, any kind of biological reality.

    All this being so, even those of us ill-disposed to the Greens should welcome this clarification. There is no need for tactful niceties and no reason to indulge the fiction the Greens are a cuddly party of tree and seal huggers. On the contrary, they are the most ideological, most extremist party represented at Holyrood. Their departure from the coalition certainly shifts the Scottish government to the right but it also places it significantly closer to the median Scottish voter.

    Even so, the SNP cannot escape their own responsibility for promulgating magical thinking in defiance of millennia of observable reality. The Scottish government’s lawyers argued in court that sex should no longer be considered “immutable”, regardless of the preposterous, indeed biologically impossible, nature of this assertion. Yousaf, meanwhile, struggled to answer the ostensibly simple question: How many sexes are there?. Little of this was encouraging — these were times when madness was let loose across the land — and all of it demonstrated the extent to which the Scottish government was captured by an extremist ideology that, like all such phenomena, brooks no dissent. The expulsion of members guilty of asserting that, yes, the world is round, demonstrates the extent to which the Green Party is now the political wing of the flat earth society. A cult, in other words.

    Massie is just talking about the Scottish Greens, where at least – as far as I'm aware – they haven't had elected councillors shouting "Allahu Akbar" and dedicating their win to the people of Gaza, as happened in Leeds.

  • Ruled by Hamas

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    Well yes, that's exactly what they want. "From the river to the sea". Judenrein.

  • Iranian counter-protestor arrested

    ting out that Hamas are, in fact, terrorists.

    Well, here we go again:

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    The man with the keffiyeh is led away to be treated in an ambulance for the "injuries" sustained in that, um, brutal assault.

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  • Ignored and sidelined

    ience, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

    She is now taking both government departments to an employment tribunal on several grounds, including unfair constructive dismissal and victimisation, as well as direct and indirect discrimination based on her philosophical beliefs.

    Ms Frances believes that she was left with no option than to quit the civil service last August after she blew the whistle on allegations of discrimination and breaches of impartiality on sex and gender issues.

    She raised concerns formally about a series of issues internally, but claims that instead of being taken seriously, she was ignored and sidelined.

    Her concerns included complaints about a “politicised climate of fear” around equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies, with civil servants who question the institutional position on issues such as gender facing negative professional consequences.

    Ms Frances also claims that an internal “Gender Identity and Intersex” policy was adopted, without proper consultation, following a workplace assessment by Stonewall, the controversial gay rights organisation.

    She says the policy’s use of politicised language and concepts – for example, defining “transphobia” as including the “denial/refusal to accept” someone’s gender identity – meant that civil servants were effectively compelled to recognise male people as women.

    She also claimed that the policy of “self-identification” in government premises meant that men were allowed to access female single-sex facilities, with the threat of disciplinary action against any women who might object….

    The Free Speech Union (FSU) is launching a crowdfunder to pay for Ms Frances to have legal representation at her tribunal, for which there was a preliminary hearing last month with further hearings expected for later this year.

    Jill Levene, legal counsel at the FSU, said: “Impartiality is the cornerstone of a well-functioning civil service. Eleanor’s treatment is a clear example of a civil service that has been captured by radical progressive ideology.”

    Go here for the FSU crowdfunder.