Author: Mick Hartley

ize: 11pt”>The school was keen. We held multiple planning calls to ensure it was constructive, appropriate, and beneficial.

Then—cancellation.

Why?

Anti-Israel students complained. Then, teachers claimed my presence would be too distressing and could harm students’ emotional safety.

Instead of defending free discussion, the school caved and withdrew the invitation.

The irony is staggering.

This school was founded to combat intolerance—its very mission shaped by a Jewish refugee who escaped the Nazis.

Yet, in 2025, a Jewish journalist is barred from speaking in person, because some students don’t want to hear what I have to say.

They offered me a pre-recorded video instead—removing any chance for real-time discussion.

I refused. Because if my ideas are too dangerous for an elite school, then what does that say about the state of open dialogue today? I am a calm, rational and respectful person.

I’ve spoken at universities, schools, and conferences worldwide.

But at a school that claims to promote “global understanding”, my voice is silenced to protect students’ feelings.

What happened to education being about challenging ideas?

If a school founded by a Jewish refugee can so easily erase Jewish voices, what does that mean for free speech in the West?

More at the Mail.

The latest on the Wuhan lab-leak cover-up, from the Times:

German spies were almost certain that the Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory, only for successive chancellors to bury the potentially explosive intelligence assessment, according to reports.

Investigations by the newspapers Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung found that the chancellery of Angela Merkel commissioned the foreign intelligence agency, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), to assess the origins of the virus in 2020.

The BND analysed public data and material obtained as part of an intelligence operation codenamed Saaremaa. This included scientific data from Chinese research institutions, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

It was said to have found evidence of high-risk experiments that artificially modified naturally occurring viruses, and numerous breaches of laboratory safety regulations. The BND’s president at the time, Bruno Kahl, briefed the chancellery while Merkel was still in office. The laboratory thesis was seen to be accurate with a probability of “80 to 95” per cent.

However, according to reports, Merkel decided to keep the assessment secret. Kahl is said to have informed the chancellery again after Olaf Scholz took over the government in 2021, without the results finding their way to the public.

"Mutti" Merkel knew what was for the best.

lect the diversity of cultures, clothing, and the characters of both the people and their horses. To date, the series covers four countries – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, India and Nepal – but the photographer’s dream is to include a photograph from every country in the world.

A strange ambition, but there we are. Strange ambitions, as a wise man perhaps once said, make the world go round.

[Photos © Sony World Photography/Ivan Ryaskov]

Shlomit Aharoni Lir at the JC – How Wikipedia is warping the world’s view of Israel:

[T]he site has become a hotbed of antisemitism, as anti-Israeli editors flocked to the platform. What happened after October 7 therefore, shouldn’t have been a surprise: when Hamas attacked Israel, the group’s online supporters were ready to pounce.

Over the following weeks and months, the fallout became clear. On English Wikipedia, a series of articles were rewritten in a tone that demonised Israel. In a report I submitted to the World Jewish Congress and presented at the United Nations last year, I highlighted how Israel has been vilified and targeted disproportionately, with entries such as “Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany”, how article titles were changed — from "massacre" to "attack" — and how Hamas’s acts of terrorism had been sanitised on the platform. It was evident that thousands of articles had been re-edited to demonise and destabilise Israel’s right to exist. At the time, however, I didn’t realise these edits were part of a larger, calculated effort to undermine the country’s right to exist….

That all changed a sometime later when a list of editors, whose usernames had repeatedly appeared in anti-Israeli editing for years, was revealed. Examining the list, I found that some of these editors were behind the decision that editing subjects related to the conflict would be restricted to users with at least 500 edits and 30 days of registered activity. Others were involved in the community decision to approve Al Jazeera as a reliable source and proclaim that Fox News and the Anti-Defamation League were not.

Most prominently, they were very involved in the framing of articles and their content. On the page for “Hamas”, for example, you’ll see a list of ideologies associated with the terror group, such as “anti-Zionism” and “anti-imperialism”. It also used to include “antisemitism,” — but that was deleted in January 2024. According to the editors, there weren’t enough scholarly sources to list antisemitism as a “central ideological tenet” of Hamas; they claimed the terror group revised its charter in 2017 to state that their problem was with Zionists rather than Jews. 

Of course. That's now the standard defence: it's Zionism we're against, not Jews. But Hamas??

And the LSE just hosted a book launch for “Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters”. There's a lot of people very keen to defend a genocidal Islamist group against the only democracy in the Middle East.

Mail headline – Fourth British man to give birth reveals how he did it.

Let me guess, is it because the "British man" is actually a woman? https://t.co/ZAOi4Kq9Gm

— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) March 12, 2025

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Men 😂 pic.twitter.com/duzk0thef3

— The Goddess (@TheGoddessF) March 11, 2025

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Well now…

“All bad ideas are French. It is an absolute principle of human existence.”

David Starkey pic.twitter.com/nBmmcWiKys

— Mark W. (@DurhamWASP) March 11, 2025

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Also postmodernism: Derrida, Lyotard, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, all that crowd. Started in France, taken up in American universities: Queer Theory, Postcolonial Theory, all the rest….

Savannah, Georgia, ca. 1901. "Down the Savannah River."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]

Hardwick Hall was used as a filming location in one of the Harry Potter films. Last year they ran an art installation the public could take part in, embroidering names of women they admire. Several children embroidered the name @jk_rowling and it caused so much controversy the pic.twitter.com/b4vbZR13ZN

— Lottie Lewis (@LottieHistory) March 11, 2025

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"….project had to be shut down temporarily whilst The National Trust decided what to do. Someone had embroidered a line through the name, and they weren't sure if they should scrap that piece or not (some other names chosen below). Some staff said they felt unsafe. In the end they decided to let people choose any name they wanted, but they put a sign up saying the names on display did not always reflect the views of The National Trust."

Added: "Ironic given Bess of Hardwick built the original hall. She was a redoubtable woman, who rose to be the richest woman in England at a time when very few woman had power or agency."

UN Watch:

Despite its abysmal record on women’s rights, Saudi Arabia is now chairing the UN’s top women’s rights body, presiding until March 21st at a gathering of global leaders that is supposed to address gender equality amid a reported backlash against women’s rights, at the 69th annual session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

“It’s surreal. Electing Saudi Arabia to head the world body for protecting women’s rights is like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based independent human rights group.

“As chair, Saudi Arabia is now in a key position to influence the planning and decisions of the world’s top women’s right body. Yet despite cosmetic reforms, Saudi Arabia continues to subject women to legal discrimination, where they are effectively enslaved under a male guardianship system that was enshrined into law three years ago, ironically on international women’s day,” said Neuer….

“One of the world’s most patriarchal and misogynistic regimes now chairs the Commission on the Status of Women, which is touted on the UN website as the “principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.”