Author: Mick Hartley

ng-left: 40px”>Two female switchboard operators who were caught engaging in non-socialist behavior last year recently faced a struggle session at the cultural center of the Songjin Steel Mill, Daily NK has learned.

“A woman working as a switchboard operator at Songjin Steel Mill invited a female colleague to her father’s birthday party and then played South Korean music for a dance party. This came to the attention of the police and the two women were publicly criticized,” a source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The two women were arrested late last year and investigated for two months. After the Lunar New Year, they were sent to a public ideological struggle session and also face legal consequences, the source said.

According to the source, the two women, who worked as switchboard operators at the Songjin Steel Mill, were both into South Korean movies, dramas, and music and had formed a close relationship while secretly watching South Korean videos.

One of the switchboard operators invited the other to her home on the birthday of her father, an official with the food administration office in Kimchaek, in late December 2023. The two of them played South Korean music on the stereo, turned up the volume, and danced to the music from early in the evening until 11 PM.

The wife of a city policeman who had recently moved to the neighborhood had also been invited to the father’s birthday party. After the police officer’s wife returned home, she told her husband that the songs at the party had the distinctive feel of South Korean music, prompting the police to investigate the incident.

“Sensing an opportunity for promotion, the police officer checked the facts of his wife’s claim and immediately reported the affair to his superiors. As a result, the two switchboard operators at the steel mill were promptly arrested, and their own superiors – the manager of the switchboard room and the secretary of the steel mill’s Socialist Patriotic Youth League chapter – were also reprimanded over the matter,” the source said.

After their arrest, the two women were subjected to a two-month investigation and then dragged in front of all the steel mill workers for a public ideological struggle session for non-socialist behavior. The source said the two women stood on stage with their hands tied and heads bowed as they endured scathing criticism in front of the entire workforce.

“The officials denounced the women’s non-socialist behavior during the struggle session and at the same time sternly warned the other workers of the need to eliminate all non-socialist elements from their lives. In the end, the official’s daughter, who was identified as the instigator, was sentenced to three years in prison, and her colleague was sent to a forced labor camp,” the source said.

The cadre at the municipal food administration office was dismissed from his post and transferred to a labor-intensive job for failing to keep his daughter in line, the source added.

lking always of the "woman" and using female pronouns throughout, but at least they mention that he's trans.

The fact that he's a man, that he's trans, is central to the story. We're being lied to…

Update: the Times article has been amended, and now at least does slip in a mention that Blake is transgender.

The real voice of Gaza:

Hamas are firing at hungry people who do not have food in their homes. Have they no shame? They got us into a war we don't want. We want peace. We want our children to go to school. Our children shouldn't be displaced. They should not live in the streets. Who is responsible for all these things? Why is Hamas doing this? They are shooting at people. Why? Because they are hungry? They are shooting at people because they are hungry?

"Sinwar, what gives you the right to kill your own people? Sinwar, it is you that is killing us, not the Israeli army. It is you who is killing us. Shame on you, Hamas.

"Listen to this. This is direct shooting. While I am talking to you, Hamas is shooting at hungry protesters."

style=”font-size: 11pt”>It may have had (slightly) more resonance at a time when war mainly meant Vietnam, but it hasn't worn well. All it leads to is empty sloganising. A room is set aside for people to write their thoughts on the wall. The dominant messages: "Free Palestine"; "Free Gaza".

ate with and expand and globalize the Palestinian cause of no Jewish state – whether they were the Nazis in the 1930’s and 40’s, the Pan-Arabists of the 1950’s and 60’s, the Soviets of the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s, the Sunni Jihadists of the 1990’s and early 2000’s – have all found themselves in the dustbin of history. That is because Antizionism and an obsession with the collective Jew is always, but always, the mark of failed societies ideologies.

There is a path to peace, and it is based on the deep transformation of the Palestinian ethos away from destruction and toward construction, away from the mistaken notion of the Jews as foreigners in this land, and toward the Abrahamic understanding of Jews as belonging in the land, and of Zionism as the realization of the millennia long connection between the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland.

This may be a tall order. It may be challenging. There is no guarantee it can be achieved. But one thing is guaranteed: wishing reality away and failing to confront it will definitely not lead to peace.

Just to be clear:

That's what the Palestinian leaders mean when they say 'from the river to the sea'.

We won't wait to be slaughtered again.#ThePalestinianLie pic.twitter.com/OsOUvOkVLw

— Ella Travels (Ella Kenan) (@EllaTravelsLove) February 23, 2024

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There's the hard left, of course, and then there's the other side of this toxic mix:

Sir William Shawcross, who reviewed the government’s counter-extremism programme last year, said the failings of the Prevent scheme had allowed Hamas supporters to intimidate MPs.

He said: “I am now seriously concerned that Prevent is simply failing to challenge the pro-Hamas campaign that is running riot on our streets. In my review I explicitly warned the government that the UK Hamas support network urgently had to be confronted. Yet since then, the problem has been left to worsen.

“Prevent should use all available means to disrupt Hamas propagandists in Britain. In the current climate, Islamist ideology is being left to capture the hearts of young people. This poses a grave danger to our country.”…

A number of MPs have expressed concerns about their safety and warned that threats from “Islamist extremists” were stifling democracy.

The Conservative MP Andrew Percy criticised the police for allowing pro-Palestinian protesters to project the slogan “from the river to the sea” onto the Elizabeth Tower, which houses Big Ben, on Wednesday night. He said: “That message says no Jew is welcome in the state of Israel or in that land. This is going to continue happening because we’re not dealing with it.” [see here – MH]

Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, said: “We have allowed our streets to be dominated by Islamist extremists, and British Jews and others to be too intimidated to walk through central London week after week. Now we’re allowing Islamist extremists to intimidate British members of parliament. It has to stop.”

would dream of such a low civilian casualty count. But because Israel is involved (‘Jews are news’) the libellous hyperbole is everywhere.

For almost 20 years since Israel withdrew from Gaza, we have heard the same allegations. Israel has been accused of committing genocide in Gaza during exchanges with Hamas in 2009, 2012 and 2014. As a claim it is demonstrably, obviously false. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the population of the Strip was around 1.3 million. Today it is more than two million, with a male life expectancy higher than in parts of Scotland. During the same period, the Palestinian population in the West Bank grew by a million. Either the Israelis weren’t committing genocide, or they tried to commit genocide but are uniquely bad at it. Which is it? Well, when it comes to Israel it seems people don’t have to choose. Everything and anything can be true at once….

I often wonder why this obsession arises when the war involves Israel. Why don’t people trawl along our streets and scream by their thousands about Syria, Yemen, China’s Uighurs or a hundred other terrible things? There are only two possible conclusions.

The first is a journalistic one. Ever since Marie Colvin was killed it became plain that western journalists were a target in Syria. Not eager to be the target, most journalists hotfooted it out of the country. Some who didn’t fell into the hands of Isis. Israel-Gaza wars by contrast do not have the same dynamic and on a technical level the media can applaud itself for reporting from a warzone where they are not the target.

But I suspect it is a moral explanation which explains the situation so many people find themselves in. They simply enjoy being able to accuse the world’s only Jewish state of ‘genocide’ and ‘Nazi-like behaviour’. They enjoy the opportunity to wound Jews as deeply as possible. Many find it satisfies the intense fury they feel when Israel is winning.

Jews now seem to function as surrogate whites – über-whites – for many on the left. The historical situation is irrelevant: that over half the Jews in Israel are as dark as the Arabs, lived for generations in North Africa and the Middle East and have no connection to Europe; that Israel is the ancestral home of the Jews, who lived there thousands of years before the Arabs arrived. None of that matters. It's all about contorting the history to squeeze it into some kind of colonialist narrative, with Jews as whites, but other whites, so the self-hatred and historic guilt is happily and enthusiastically directed towards this other group – Jews! What delight to be be able to turn all that self-hatred against the very people who've historically been persecuted more than any other, and to use the Holocaust against the Jews. All the vicious old antisemitic tropes given an exciting new frisson of righteous anger. 

The fact that Hamas has openly proclaimed its goal of killing all the Jews, and that the slogan "from the river to the sea" calls for the destruction of Israel – ie genocide – just adds another layer of irony.

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Confusion on confusion. No, gender critics do not believe that gay people are sinful. No, gender identity is most certainly not a biological characteristic….

And it's you on the way out, not the gender critical movement.

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