Author: Mick Hartley

in this curious loathing for Israel. The idea that the Jewish nation is inherently genocidal, that it targets children for ‘bloodletting’, resuscitates the medieval calumny that treated the Jews as a child-sacrificing race.

When the fog of war clears, we’ll need a reckoning with how the activist class and the media talked about this conflict. Why they so rarely mentioned the deaths of Hamas militants. Why they depicted a war on an army of anti-Semites as a slaughter of civilians. Why they engaged in the shameful moral inversion of calling Israel’s fightback against genocidal terrorists a ‘genocide’. Too many have made themselves the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas, foolishly spreading its lies about the war and its libels against the Jewish state.

The BBC still reports every communication on casualties from Hamas as front page news. 

hich allows men into women’s changing rooms. Much of this pressure appears to have come from one specific company.

The group “UK ACTIVE” have produced trans inclusive guidelines which encourage front line staff in gyms and leisure centres to “assist trans people to access leisure centres”, but which actually deny women’s right to single-sex changing space and “assist” men in getting naked in front of women and children.

Fearful of censure, or complicit with the group’s aims, gyms and leisure centres have complied almost universally with these guidelines. Now if women want to change and shower at the gym, their safety, privacy and dignity are compromised. The cruel advice from UK Active is, “a trans person should be permitted to use whichever single-sex area they choose”.

Objections will not be tolerated:

The Orwellian direction to gyms from UK Active is that:

You should adopt a zero-tolerance policy on any transphobic behaviour from staff or facility users … be prepared to challenge transphobic language, attitudes and behaviours. Explain your and their requirements within the law to the person objecting and affirm that you will be supporting your trans facility users. In terms of education other facility users direct them to literature online, link them with a local LGBT association or perhaps even consider running workshops.

The idea that women will be policed, bullied and silenced if they don’t comply with accepting men in their changing rooms is nothing short of horrifying.

It's reminiscent of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre farrago, when former (male) boss Mridul Wadhwa gave his opinion that rape victims unwilling to be seen by men (trans women) should be challenged on their prejudices, and made to "reframe" their trauma. So many people – well, men – so keen to tell women what they're doing wrong. And, usually, it's about not letting men get what they want. 

This is very depressing. From the Times:

Prisoners who refuse to join radical Islamist gangs are having to be placed in segregation units for their own safety, The Times can reveal.

Officers at HMP Frankland in Co Durham, one of the highest-security jails in Britain, are keeping vulnerable prisoners apart from Islamic extremists in an effort to maintain order and discipline.

The jail has become so overrun with Islamic gangs that its “terrorist separation centres”, built to stop terrorists from radicalising other prisoners, have become obsolete.

Instead, other prisoners are forced into the isolation units to protect them because they are at risk of being attacked and face death threats if they refuse to join the gangs.

The prison has been accused of appeasing fundamentalists amid a power struggle between radical Islamists and other inmates that is mirrored in many British jails.

The most dangerously influential Islamist prisoners, deemed at a high risk of radicalising others, were supposed to be isolated within these terrorist separation centres. Now though it seems that the Islamists outnumber the rest, so they control the prison while those brave few unwilling to proclaim their allegiance to jihad populate the separation centres. How on earth could it have come to this?

A report in 2022 by Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, found that terrorists had been able to seize control of wings and set up sharia courts in some prisons in England and Wales without resistance from prison staff, who were afraid of being accused of Islamophobia if they intervened.

Ah yes. That's how.

He found that Islamic extremists had sought to dictate the diets and washing habits of non-Muslim prisoners and had set up sharia courts to deliver punishments such as flogging.

They escaped punishment by arguing that their prison cells did not come under the jurisdiction of terrorism laws.

Simon Evans at Spiked on the extraordinary establishment fixation with Adolescence:

Alongside the ubiquitous demands for more social-media censorship, moves are now afoot to make Adolescence not merely free to view in British schools, as Netflix has just agreed to do, but also compulsory. It’s only a matter of time, surely, before it replaces the footy in pubs, barber shops (ones that actually cut hair anyway) and cab offices up and down the country. Anyone attempting to buy anything sharper than a spatula from Amazon might soon have to watch a few edited highlights of the show and answer a short questionnaire.

Meanwhile, LBC found a new angle on Adolescence to pursue this week. When Tory leader Kemi Badenoch pointed out to presenter Nick Ferrari that it is a work of fiction, and that there are more pressing issues to worry about, Ferrari suggested that for a politician not to have watched it might be regarded as a ‘dereliction of duty’. His LBC colleague, James O’Brien, went even further. ‘The idea that you would have swerved this programme is unthinkable’, he said. ‘It’s not just the ignorance and the blithe arrogance that’s offensive, it’s the revelling in it’, he despaired, his face like a bag of bewildered offal. O’Brien looked as if he suspected her of not having seen Paddington 2, either, but on this he bit his lip.

Badenoch does seem to have grasped something important that has eluded many others – namely, that ‘the story on which it is based on has been fundamentally changed’, as she put it. Co-creator Stephen Graham has said that one of the real-life incidents that inspired Adolescence was a ‘young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop’ – a reference to the 2023 murder of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu in Croydon. Everyone knows that this had nothing to do with the manosphere, and that the backgrounds of the perpetrator and victim were very different from the characters in Adolescence.

The establishment left is increasingly dependent on fiction – whether novels, films or TV dramas – to tell the story it wants to, to obscure inconvenient facts and to drive the discourse it wants to hear.

The undoubted excellence of the acting, and the technical triumph of those episode-length single shots, seem to have seduced everyone into thinking that this must then be showing a powerful truth. As Kemi said though: it's not real, and it's not even an accurate portrayal of what's happening with these stabbings.

It's fiction.

hem to fit into a march that claims to be inclusive.

Yes, it's inclusive alright:

Any person who identifies as a dyke is welcome to march regardless of gender expression or identity, sex assigned at birth, sexual orientation, race, age, political affiliation, religious identity, ability, class, or immigration status.

Just not Jews.

riage by threatening to add their names to labor mobilization lists and classify them as volunteers for work in rural communities, mines, or long-term construction projects.

In response to the Nampo party committee’s policy, the district of Waudo has been arranging forced marriages of unmarried women over 28 since March 19.

Neighborhood watch unit heads and Socialist Patriotic Youth League officials in the district are arranging marriages after compiling lists of unmarried women over 28. Women who refuse are classified as eligible for labor mobilizations as “shirkers of their socialist duty.”

For the benefit of those questioning why fencing has sex categories, have any of you ever watched fencing?

Lunge strength and speed passed you by, did it? pic.twitter.com/yCB7O5iszT

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) April 2, 2025

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The case of the Adult Human Female film-makers against the UCU, as reported in the Guardian:

Two academics behind a gender-critical film have taken legal action against their union, accusing it of discrimination and harassment after it campaigned on social media to stop the documentary being screened.

Deirdre O’Neill, a senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Hertfordshire, and Michael Wayne, a professor of media and film studies at Brunel University, describe Adult Human Female as the first UK documentary to look at the “clash between women’s rights and gender ideology/trans rights”.

When a screening was arranged at the University of Edinburgh in 2022, documents before the tribunal said the local branch of the University and College Union (UCU) wrote to the university calling on it to cancel the event, describing it as a “clear attack on trans people’s identities” and denouncing it as “transphobic” on Twitter….

O’Neill and Wayne, who describe themselves as gender critical, believe sex is a matter of biology, that it is impossible for a human to change sex, and that sex is important in a range of different political and social contexts.

They also do not subscribe to gender identity theory, “namely the belief that people are born with an internal sense of gender which may or may not correspond to their biological sex”, the documents state.

Can you believe it? Guardian readers must have been spluttering over their cornflakes reading this. But yes, there are people out there who believe that sex is a matter of biology, that it's important, and that gender identity is not a thing. There are also people out there who believe that 2 plus 2 equals 4, despite the repeated testimony of leading academics and Queer Mathematics theorists that this is a gross simplification based on outdated neocolonialist thinking, and that with a deeper understanding we can see that 2 plus 2 may often, in fact, equal 5.

The real story is that there’s not a newsroom on the planet who hasn’t known this since day one. pic.twitter.com/IuWhQ9d7b4

— Galut Greg🎗️ גלות 流亡 (@ExiledIsraelite) April 2, 2025

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

s/2025/04/mt_imported_image_1758237058.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Eastern-blocks1″ />
Prague

Tbilisi

Vilnius

Tallinn

Tbilisi

Lviv

Chișinău

Prague
[Photos © Zupagrafika]