Author: Mick Hartley

While the students at Columbia and elsewhere, in their righteous anti-Israel frenzy, chant the praises of Hamas and of Iran's proxy armies committed to the killing of Jews, real protest heroes do emerge. Just not on American campuses.

An Iranian court has sentenced to death a popular rapper jailed for more than a year and a half for supporting nationwide protests sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death, according to local media reports.

“Branch 1 of Isfahan Revolutionary Court… sentenced Toomaj Salehi to death on the charge of corruption on Earth,” the singer’s lawyer Amir Raisian says, as quoted by the reformist Shargh newspaper.

Toomaj Salehi, a beloved Iranian rapper and activist, has just been sentenced to death for his involvement in the Women, Life, Freedom movement that exploded after the murder of Masha Amini by Iranian Morality Police.

The Islamic Regime in Iran has been cruelly and violently… pic.twitter.com/ueKpHxAh8o

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) April 24, 2024

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[All images © Siobhán Doran]

[As ever, click to enlarge]

ed from China to North Korea last year are being held in political prison camps. Among the 200 defectors, all those who tried to reach South Korea or interacted with Christians while in China were sent to the camps without exception.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in North Korea told Daily NK on Monday that ten of the defectors who were forcibly repatriated last October were sent to political prison camps after three months of intense interrogation about their defection and behavior in China. The defectors were interrogated at centers run by state security departments in Sinuiju and Onsong County.

The authorities found that the ten defectors had either contacted Christian groups in China, provided information about North Korea to other countries (such as South Korea or the U.S.), or attempted to go to South Korea.

In particular, defectors were automatically sent to the camps if there was any evidence that they had read the Bible or heard Christian doctrine. Any North Korean who comes into contact with Christianity, even once, risks being sent to a political prison camp, which is tantamount to a life sentence.

According to the 2022 Report on International Religious Freedom released by the U.S. State Department last year, an estimated 50,000-70,000 North Koreans are in political prison camps simply for being Christians.

North Korean state security departments base their interrogations of repatriated defectors on case files provided by the Chinese police. If the case files mention anything related to religion, the defectors cannot avoid being sentenced to the camps, no matter what excuses or explanations they offer, the source explained.

There's the obvious threat to North Korea's Kim worship, of course, but Christianity also teaches the individual conscience – a dangerous heresy in the Orwellian Juche dystopia.

ont-size: 11pt”>• the betrayer and killer of the universal God, drainer of gentile blood, poisoner of the wells, etc (Christian antisemitism);
• the tribal anachronism, the enemy of the Age of Reason (Enlightenment antisemitism);
• the rootless cosmopolitan, everywhere the enemy of and fifth column within organic nations (Counter-Enlightenment antisemitism);
• the biologically programmed threat to all races, to be eliminated to the last child (Nazi antisemitism);
• the sons of apes and pigs who will be killed on a Day of Judgment (some forms of Islam and modern Islamic antisemitism);
• the arch-capitalist exploiter – to be hung from the lampposts as German Communist Ruth Fischer put it, latterly the arch-colonialist (Left antisemitism);

Today, in addition to all of the above (each of which is still with us), there is a new form of antisemitism which has been the consequence of the development of a Jewish State – Israel – and the demonisation of it.

‘Zionism’, properly understood, is a movement of national liberation for the Jewish people. But it is demonised today through the antisemitic ideas of the ‘The Zios’, ‘The Zionists’, ‘Global Zionism’ and ‘the all-powerful Jewish Lobby’.

Once it was ‘the Jew’ now it is ‘the Zionist’ that is – for the contemporary antisemite – malign, still controlling the world for Jewish purposes, and still string-pulling. The ‘Zionists’ power is still seen by the antisemite as virtually unlimited, still exercised through their hidden control of global media, political parties and governments, and global finance. 'They' are still uniquely evil, the modern-day Nazis.

And that world view – for that is what it is – is antisemitism ‘dressed up’ as anti-Zionism.

In New Hampshire they're debating a bill that "requires school sports teams to be expressly designated as male, female, or coed, and prohibits biologically male students from participating in female designated sports or entering female locker rooms." Here's a science teacher:

"When it comes to biological sex.. Nature doesn't stick to categories that humans have invented." If she's cut from a team "that's because I didn't work hard enough." Science teacher Audrey Nelson testifies against NH SB375. #NHPolitics #SaveWomensSports pic.twitter.com/gfKlYNxYUo

— Sidewalk Steve (@Sidewalk_Steve) April 23, 2024

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The comments are not kind. As Helen Joyce puts it, "And men should just try harder if they want to get pregnant."

The bill failed.

y author Graham Linehan, 55, the Father Ted creator and now a gender-critical campaigner.

The party dropped its year-long investigation into Ms Duffield earlier in 2024 but she has spoken about feeling “isolated” among Labour MPs for her views.

Those with gender-critical views believe that a person’s sex cannot be changed and are generally opposed to the idea that gender identity is more important than biological sex.

Those with gender-critical views know that a person’s sex cannot be changed. And they generally don't believe in "gender identity", viewing it as cult-speak nonsense. It's why they're called gender-critical.

Following Ms Mahmood’s comments on Monday night, the Harry Potter author wrote on X: “If senior opposition figures agree with me that sex is real and immutable, I hope we’ll soon see an apology to [Rosie Duffield], who believes exactly what I believe.”

“gender identity”, but they can no longer expect all public institutions to go along with their dodgy faith. Instead, this new religion should assume its rightful position among the many strange but unscientific beliefs that we co-exist with: astrology, reiki, and past-life regression, for instance. You can’t stop folk believing weird stuff, but when something is harmful to women, to gay people, to children, then we have every right to refuse this faith in the public sphere.

Until fairly recently, it has been heresy to do so. Those still defending the sterilisation and mutilation of children are exposing themselves daily. Of course, they are squirming because it was never about the children for them; it was about proving their own purity to the other cult members. The kids were just collateral damage in a culture war we were told was not actually real.

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“Man and Iguana”

“Metacognition”

“Woman with Mannequin on Motorbike”

“Diverse Pathways”

“Bicyclist and Steam”

“Among Us”

“Police Officer, Red-Tailed Hawk, and Rodent”

“Nature’s Crown”
[All images © Tony Van Le]

More at his website.

the nore notable "witches" to be burnt in the Great Trans Crusade.

Here again is a difference with more benign aesthetic crazes: if you don’t keep up with the moral version, you risk losing your social circle or even your job. But the reputational cascade that was wokeness didn’t just deter dissent from those frightened to swim against the perceived tide. It also incentivised opportunists, who actively used the surging tide to swim further ahead than their competitors. Many organisations latched on to it as a positive marketing strategy, thereby creating workplace structures and habits that, from the inside, now seem very difficult to unpick.

Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t be too gloomy. For of course, the existence of a reputational cascade doesn’t require sincere belief in the rectitude or wisdom of whatever behaviours you are copying, only the sincere belief that nearly everybody else thinks such behaviours are good ones. And, while no doubt depressing as a fact about human nature, this also has an upside: it only takes widespread realisation that other people don’t actually believe what you thought they believed for a reputational cascade to collapse. As organisations start to cotton on properly to the fact the tides of fashion are turning, it will be interesting to see what happens next.

On wokeness, this is good from Andrew Sullivan, on the subject of Katherine Maher (via Jerry Coyne):

The point I have been trying to make for years now is that wokeness is not some racier version of liberalism, merely seeking to be kinder and more inclusive. It is, in fact, directly hostile to liberal values; it subordinates truth to ideology; it judges people not by their ability but by their identity; and it regards ideological diversity as a mere dog-whistle for bigotry. Maher has publicly and repeatedly avowed support for this very illiberalism. If people with these views run liberal institutions, the institutions will not — cannot — remain liberal for very long. And they haven’t. Elite universities are turning into madrassas, and media is turning into propaganda.

Back on the track with Jack Delano, March 1943. "Chicago, Illinois. Switchmen riding one of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe diesel switch engines."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]