Author: Mick Hartley

rs from a range of voices on my own side of the conflict. A message of unrestrained militancy, a threat to the world, a warning, an omen of violence. The language of Hamas, the language of al-muqawama (the resistance), the language of war.

But this is not Gaza, nor Yemen, nor Tehran. These are not the militant words of some radical imam amid the dust clouds of Arabia, or the war-torn Mediterranean landscape of Gaza. These are signs posted and words spoken at Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment, in New York, the city with the largest Jewish population in the world – a city populated by 1.6 million Jews as compared to second-place Jerusalem’s 546,000 Jews. If these students wished to emulate their heroes of the Al-Aqsa Flood and attack or kidnap Jews, they would have plenty to choose from.

“Jews, Jews”, the hordes of American students chanted, “go back to Poland”. Many of these students might identify as left-wing and anti-racist, but the only recent historical parallel to this uncloaked antisemitism were the naked chants of “Jews will not replace us” spewed by the so-called alt-right, the incels, groypers, and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017.

Do these idiots really think Jews came from Poland? Don't they know any history beyond a fairy-tale fantasy of lovely innocent brown people and horrible Jew colonisers? – that Israel is the Jewish ancestral homeland? – that they were there thousands of years before the Arabs showed up with the Islamic Arab conquests of the 7th century? – that nearly a half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, mostly expelled from Middle Eastern countries and with no connection to Europe?

And do they know that Auschwitz is in Poland? Or is that the point?

Update: Brendan O'Neill:

We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.

s://www.thejc.com/news/usa/biden-denounces-blatant-antisemitism-at-columbia-university-as-jewish-students-urged-to-leave-campus-w0fnokbi”>Columbia University say, and get cheered by all the excited young Free Palestine progressives.

onaghan Advice shows the school and council were unlawful in their actions. We want every parent or teacher branded transphobic for challenging these policies to be empowered by Cass and have access to Monaghan so they can hold schools and councils to account, and vulnerable children can be supported with holistic, efficacious, evidence based and lawful care….

Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkits, such as the Allsorts/Brighton Council one, alongside an increasingly large library of trans picture books for young children, are taking away the security of fixed sex identity for children and replacing it with a confusing smorgasbord of “gender” choice which many children cannot cope with. We are creating children who are “gender-confused” or “gender-questioning” (which are both used as synonyms for “trans”) and then, as the queues grow, asking where the services are for “trans kids”. We have a schools-to-clinic pipeline.  

If you want to reduce the waiting lists for unhappy children, then part of the solution is to look more critically at the source of their unhappiness. When that source consists of outside agencies with an ideological agenda having a disproportionate influence on schools and education, that needs to be stopped. Bring on the public enquiry.  

to make criticism of Islam illegitimate – and that attempt should be resisted. We should be free to criticise Islam just as we criticise Christianity, socialism, capitalism, or any other system of beliefs.

The fact that the most well-known Islamic apostate, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is under constant police protection, that Ibn Warraq, author of "Why I am Not a Muslim", has to write under a pseudonym, and that cartoons of Mohammed still attract death threats and Facebook bans, suggests how far we still have to go. The aim should be, at least for those Muslims resident in the West, that they feel as free to abandon the faith of their parents (or not to, of course) as Christians, atheists, and all the rest of us are free now to make our own choices. As long as Islamophobia is accepted as a legitimate term of criticism, we won't start making any progress.

yle=”font-size: 11pt”>She says that they were also put under pressure to affirm children’s choices of gender, even where it had nothing to do with protecting them against physical and sexual abuse, which is the NSPCC’s founding purpose.

This isn't new: we heard about the NSPCC captured by Stonewall last year. Nothing seems to have changed…yet.

e”, we believe the role of our own profession should be fully examined.

The British Psychological Society has long been captured by gender ideology.

“Pierce one ear. Now you can teach physics.”#ICYMI read more #TGIF by @NellieBowles here: https://t.co/5BImklU9Ye pic.twitter.com/Ep639mUe40

— The Free Press (@TheFP) April 20, 2024

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f-inflicted catastrophe of extraordinary proportions. After 45 years there is only one thing, he concluded, that modern Iran has proven itself to be truly expert in: making enemies.

If the regime in Tehran falls, then Hamas, Hezbollah, the Youthis will surely follow – and the whole panoply of terror organisation plaguing the Middle Eastern landscape. The Iranian people are ready, but sadly the US isn't – having shifted its recent Middle Eastern strategy away from George Bush's "axis of evil" to Obama and Biden's misconceived efforts to accept Iran as a legitimate and responsible player.

: 11pt”>In a way, FGM is another circle of horror — a cultural practice whose victims feel compelled to assist in its perpetuation to others partly in order to make sense of what’s been done to themselves, because the moment it stops continuing to happen, it becomes clear that the custom has no medical justification outside of itself.

….with the benefit of an outside perspective we can see very clearly that there’s no direct medical necessity to remove parts of women & girls’ clitorises and labia, and that whatever supposed benefits this practice confers to such victims — I will never call them “patients” or “subjects” or any other word besides victims, no matter how “medicalized” these atrocities are presented to be — it’s entirely dependent on the cultural/social landscape: the domain of social hierarchies and taboos and superstitions and rituals, and the foul effluvium of woman-hatred that clouds the senses of those within it.

Now, imagine there was a report that analyzed the efficacy of female genital mutilation strictly in terms of short-to-medium term self-reported mental health outcomes without ever addressing the question of why the practice had begun in the first place. Wouldn’t that be outrageous?!

To be clear, I’m not trying to say that the Cass report is outrageous — far from it; I think it’s a powerful and necessary report, which is already proving to be greatly beneficial to the struggle to put the “trans kids” scandal behind us. But it’s a sign of how outrageous our current social climate is, how mired in the bog we are, that we can’t be allowed to step all the way back and point out the true horror of the big picture.

No human female is born with an innate medical condition in which she is doomed to suffer unless otherwise healthy parts of her genitals are sliced off of her body. This should be self-evident.

Likewise, no human of either sex is born with an innate medical condition in which they will suffer from such dire psychological distress they might die of suicide unless their otherwise healthy reproductive organs and breasts are removed, their puberty suppressed, a host of other cosmetic medical treatments are given, and that all of society is compelled to collude together to suppress all evidence of the sex of these poor innocents.

Worth a read.

Yaser Mohamad Khani, 3rd place Professional Competition, Architecture and Design, in the Sony World Photography Awards 2024:

In recent years, due to population growth and lack of sufficient housing, the towns near Tehran have been crowded and people have to migrate here.

[Images © Yaser Mohamad Khani]