Author: Mick Hartley

From the Times:

Antisemitism in the UK is “off the rails”, according to the director of a new film about an explosion of violence on American university campuses.

Wendy Sachs’s documentary October 8 was released on Friday in the US and she hopes to bring the film to British audiences this year.

The film comes as President Trump’s administration this week cancelled $400 million in funds to Columbia University in New York, claiming that it failed to protect Jewish students amid pro-Palestinian protests on campus.

Sachs, who is also the film’s executive producer, said there were “a lot of parallels” with the UK.

“As someone who is very much entrenched in Democratic politics and progressive causes, I can tell you what’s happening on the left here in America really mirrors what’s been happening on the left in the UK for more than a decade,” she said.

Well yes, it's bad here – but Americans, especially on the left, do love to point out how bad things are here in the UK by comparison with their own "City on a Hill". See the NYT. I'd suggest that we have nothing here on the scale of Columbia University, say, to pick the obvious example. The familiar Zionist-Nazi slurs combine with all the settler colonialism stuff they get taught there to produce a particularly toxic mix of anti-Zionist/antisemitic activism.

On the other hand:

University societies are glorifying Hamas and sharing antisemitic messages, with campus tensions escalating so severely that Jewish sixth-formers are attending workshops to prepare them for being targeted for abuse.

The higher education regulator has warned universities that free speech does not include harassment of Jewish students nor support for terrorists. Its intervention came after student activists shared material sympathetic to Hamas.

Analysis by The Times found student groups praising terrorist “martyrs”, including the architect of the October 7 atrocity in which more than 1,200 people were killed, and liking images on social media of Hamas fighters.

You know, the way Putin is now wriggling out of the ceasefire proposal is just the quintessence of how Russia has behaved for all these decades and what kind of 'peace deals' it is willing to make.

In particular, he's saying: 'We are, in principle, open to a ceasefire, but…

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) March 13, 2025

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In particular, he's saying: 'We are, in principle, open to a ceasefire, but Ukraine must not receive aid, must not mobilize troops, and must not rearm itself for these 30 days bla bla bla."

But does Russia, in turn, plan to stop producing weapons, refrain from supplying them to its troops, halt artillery and ammunition purchases from North Korea and Iran, stop manufacturing missiles and drones, and cease buying cannon fodder across Russia and North Korea for insane amounts of money?

Well, of course, absolutely fucking not.

Putin has spent his entire life demanding everything from everyone while offering nothing in return.

Go ahead, try negotiating "peace" with this KGB con artist.

Q&A Wisconsin testimony AB104 @JamieWhistle talks about how she came to change her mind. …. “ I beg my party , please, do the scientific right thing.” pic.twitter.com/2dRHQe63jO

— LGB Courage Coalition (@LGBCourage) March 13, 2025

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[Photos © Sonya Newell-Smith]

From their new book Brick Lane in London: All the World’s a Stage.

ef=”https://t.co/b630eUhRW3″>https://t.co/b630eUhRW3

— Victoria Smith (@glosswitch) March 14, 2025

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Article https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js“>here. It's about the woman opening a gym in South London for women only:

It’s sad to see a gym committed to inclusivity fall into the trap of excluding trans women — and, no doubt, extremely painful for trans women to see their validity as women called into question….

However, Barnett’s gym policy is just one small piece in a much broader picture of anti-trans sentiment and transmisogyny (misogyny aimed at trans women).

The policing of trans women’s inclusion in sport and continued efforts to push them out of women’s spaces is often justified under the banner of ‘protecting biological women’.

But when we fall into the trap of defining women in strictly biological terms, we harm all women — reinforcing restrictive definitions of womanhood and encouraging greater scrutiny of gender norms.

Ah yes, transmisogyny. It's the new transphobia.

erial violence, and second, quotidian queer and lesbian-dog relationalities and becomings. In the first, the article traces how dogs are weaponized as tools of state violence and proposes a queer lesbian feminist critique of white supremacy and militarization that can also extend to a critique of the violence committed through and toward the dogs. In the second, the article analyzes how, within lesbian, non-binary, and trans-dog intimacies, dogs help articulate queer gender, sexuality, and kinship formations, and as such, queer worlds for gender, sexual, and kin becomings. The entanglements of violence and love in these queer dog relationalities provide insights into the complexities of queer and lesbian feminist worldbuilding. Lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics can help theorize the potentials and challenges of these interspecies entanglements.

Trans-dog intimacies??

The author, Chloe Diamond-Lenow, is an Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Study at SUNY Oneonta. "They specialize in feminist and queer theory, postcolonial animal studies, affect theory, cultural studies, and theories of intersectionality. Some of the classes they teach include “Queer Theory,” “Trans and  Women of Color Feminisms,” “Trans Lives and Constructs of Conformity,” and “Gender, Power, and Difference"."

a birthday card from the vice-president of the United States.

That was Kamala Harris, after Joe Biden received Mulvaney at the White House. "God love you" was Biden's heart-felt response on meeting the pink ever-so-girlie wonder. And, apart perhaps from Gavin Newsom, the Dems still haven't worked out why Trump won.

er’s green card and canceled $400 million in federal funding because of the university’s failure to address anti-Semitism on campus.

This student-led movement is also supported by some faculty. We have identified one Columbia professor, neuropsychologist Jennifer J. Manly, who participated in the pro-Hamas protests and stood in a human blockade intending to prevent administrators from dismantling the unauthorized encampments last April. In photos taken of the event, Manly is visible wearing an orange vest and standing with fellow Columbia professors as they marched for Gaza, in front of banners reading “Demilitarize education” and “Palestine is Everywhere”; others called for financial boycott and divestment from Israel.

Our research has revealed that Manly is not only employed by the university but also subsidized by the American taxpayer. According to the National Institutes of Health and other publicly accessible databases, she has been named in connection with over $100 million in grants over the past 20 years. Much of her research is based on the so-called social determinants of health thesis, which posits that racism, sexism, and homophobia can cause brain disease in “Black and Latinx communities”—a thesis that critics have described as pseudo-science. (Manly, Columbia, and NIH did not return requests for comment.)

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"The enormity of what they’ve done – what they are still doing – to children is too great: their brains freeze when confronted with the truth."

e from strength to strength, with up to 2,000 followers. Like Boko Haram, it recruits and kidnaps child soldiers, and sees schools as targets for headline-grabbing atrocities.

Remember the Lord's Resistance Army? They were an ultra-violent Christian group – from Uganda originally, like the Muslim ADF – responsible for countless atrocities during the 1990s and 2000s. They too, like the ADF, kidnapped schoolchildren as slaves/recruits. They disappeared into the forests of the eastern Congo and are now little more than a reduced remnant of outlaws. It's the turn of the Muslims now…