Mick Hartley

Author: Mick Hartley

  • Operation Safe Return

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    For two days I was stranded in Paphos, but everywhere I went – from the streets to the hotel to the Chabad House that opened its doors within hours – I met Israelis who had one goal: get back home. Not to safety. To Israel.

    This afternoon, I finally did. On a tugboat.

    Nine of us squeezed onto a vessel captained by Eli, a veteran Israeli sailor who didn’t ask questions – just took the wheel. Among us: a brother and sister who are farmers and grow flowers in the Arava. They’d been in Holland on a sales trip. The brother insisted on returning to report for reserves.

    Another was a CEO from Karmiel. His company has 100 employees and global orders he’s now fighting to fulfill despite a country under fire. There was a woman – an energy worker – who left the Ivory Coast to come home, a high-tech investor who wanted to be back with his children and grandkids holed up at his house and two young men, fresh out of the army, who cut short their trip in the Philippines, coming under physical attacks in Greece and elsewhere because they spoke Hebrew.

    No one asked if it was safe. But that’s not how Israelis think.

    We are a people who run toward home, not away from it. Toward our families, our communities, our nation. Even in war.

    That’s the difference. That’s what makes us who we are.

  • Ahmad-Reza Radan

    ioned by the US and EU was an honor for himself and all military commanders. He stated that "becoming a martyr and being sanctioned are equally enjoyable" to him. Radan views these sanctions as a "badge of honor", comparing them to an honorary medal for serving the Islamic Republic.

    At last his dream of martyrdom has been realised.

  • Trans rights

    are supposed to be lacking…they want you to understand that trans people are somehow being denied basic rights, suffering "discrimination in the distribution of social goods (housing, education, employment, etc.)", when in fact what they want is for trans people – trans-identified males – "to access women's private spaces or play on women’s sports teams, or require that people speak as if they accept, for example, that trans-identified males are women". That's why they never spell it out. It sounds good, but it's a con. 

  • Iranian stooge

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    Not just academics. The UN's 'Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories', Francesca Albanese, expressed her support in a now-deleted tweet – "I stand with Justice, against racism, against Apartheid, and WITH Professor Miller."

    Added: 2021 letter from academics "in support of Professor Miller".

  • The sound of laughter

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    I’ve received thousands of messages from inside Iran showing young women dancing in the streets, or families cheering in their kitchens. They remember these commanders as the ones who gave the orders to shoot protesters in the eyes, jail teenage girls, and lie to the world while building bombs in secret.

    One mother in Tehran who was imprisoned for protesting the 2019 murder of her child wrote to me that “waking up to the news of Salami’s death, I started to scream out of joy that I’m seeing justice.” She told me that “soon you’ll be back to Iran and we’ll dance on the graves of these killers.”

  • A threat to the entire world

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    The regime had been secretly working on building a nuclear device since the end of 2023, shortly after Hamas’ October 7 massacre.

    The IDF monitored Iranian nuclear progress and was left with no doubt that they were building a weapon—and it may have been at a more advanced stage than Israeli intelligence knew. This was crucial to the decision to carry out a preemptive strike.

    A nuclear weapon in the hands of the regime is not only a threat to Israel, but a threat to the entire world.

  • A cult on display

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    Debbie Hayton in the Spectator went to check it out:

    The Bristol Museum and Art Gallery is one of those places that makes me feel uncomfortable. I feel picked-on even visiting the website. At the top of the screen – before any mention of the collections and exhibitions – we are all told that ‘Bristol Museums welcomes trans and gender-diverse visitors, volunteers and members of staff’.

    Perhaps this is a response to the Supreme Court judgement that biological sex quite rightly takes precedence over paperwork when distinguishing women from men? But I find it unhelpful and intrusive. I might be transsexual, but I am a human being just like everyone else, and I don’t need special treatment.

    I certainly don’t want images that appear to promote elective double mastectomy – mutilating surgery in other words – emblazoned on two giant murals three metres high on either side of the main entrance hall of the museum. This, after all, is a place where groups of primary school children gather to be briefed before being shown the various collections held by the city.

    Get 'em young – that's the trans way. "You are loved".

    The language, the methods and the imagery – there was a space filled with shifting lights, colours and sounds in the exhibition to ‘recharge and heal’ – could have been taken straight from a religious cult on a recruitment drive. ‘You are loved’, we kept being told. From where else might we hear messages like that?

    Art can be an educator, and sometimes it educates in a way that the creator did not anticipate. This exhibition certainly educated me. It left me with the distinct feeling that this is a cult and we need to be on our guard against it. The risk is not from society as a whole, but an activist lobby that appears to encourage victimhood and creates vulnerability. That’s no way to live.

    Maybe others in the room had come to similar conclusions? But I didn’t ask. We were all under the beady eye of the museum staff and despite the ‘all are welcome here’ mantra, I got the feeling that heterodox views would be poorly received.

    Times are changing fast, though, and in some ways this exhibition marked the great heresy of the past ten years – that gender identity trumps biological sex. Perhaps a museum is a good place for it?

    Yep. A vision of a dying cult.

  • Iran’s arrogance

    srael. He made the same claim in 2021. Yet Salami did not take any safeguards apparently in terms of his own protection in Iran. He felt that Israel would not dare attack Iran. He assumed that he and his commanders were safe. The IRGC had been involved in wars across the region, sending forces to Iraq, Syria and other countries. They had felt they could inflame wars but they didn’t believe it would to Tehran’s own doorstep. Even after the Israeli strikes in 2024, which followed Iran’s attacks on Israel, the IRGC felt secure. It saw the talks with the Trump administration and assumed all was fine. It even likely saw the tensions grow on June 11 and 12 with reports of US State Department personnel preparing to evacuate Iraq and other countries. However, Salami and his commanders felt nothing would happen. After years of threatening Israel, they felt that they would never pay a price.

    Iran often accused Israel and the US of being “arrogant powers.” In 2020 Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani described the US as "the wicked hands of the global arrogance, with the usurper Zionist regime as the mercenary.” Despite the regime’s claims that others were arrogant, it was Iran’s arrogance at assuming it could terrorize the entire Middle East and spread proxy wars across the region and not face any pushback. It must have noted that fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 and wondered if it had miscalculated. However, it didn’t seem to heed the lesson.

  • The religious psychopaths in Tehran

    le=”font-size: 11pt”>Mutually assured destruction: you may remember the phrase. Pundits often intimate that nuclear war can’t happen because nobody would launch a first strike in the knowledge that the inevitable counterattack would kill them too. This is wrong. Utterly wrong. The logic may work for western leaders. It might work with Russia too: do you think Putin — with his looted billions, young girlfriend and grotesque venality — wants to die? Not a chance. Not even the criminal Kim Jong-un wishes to perish, marinading, as he does, in the imperial harem with the monstrous privileges he steals from his impoverished people.

    Religious fanatics are different. Radically different. They want to die. It’s why it is not just conceivable but probable that an ageing fundamentalist leader would launch a nuclear strike against Israel, and feel closer to Allah as the inevitable response loomed large on the radar screen. Do western commentators still not understand that this is precisely why so many sane Iranians (the majority) are thrilled by the Israeli attack? They know only too well that an Iranian nuclear weapon isn’t only an existential threat to the “Zionists” but, just as surely, to themselves. They would be incinerated in the counterstrike, their lives lost as collateral damage in another person’s sick fantasy.

    Wake up, world. Every conversation I had in Israel in February, including with three former PMs, opposition leaders and security experts, circled back to the Iranian threat. Remember, too, that Iran gaining a nuclear weapon would lead instantly to proliferation across the region and the wider world. In other words, it would be the first domino that could, in time, lead to the destruction of humanity. It is why the phrase I keep hearing — that Israel is doing the world a “favour” — is so inadequate. A favour? It is facing reprisals and death for hitting the head of the snake on behalf of us all.

  • Floral murals

    =twsrc%5Etfw”>May 29, 2025

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