Mick Hartley

Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator – Israel won’t stop in Lebanon until Hezbollah is crushed:

As has been obvious for a while, the government of Lebanon has no intention and also no ability to disarm Hezbollah by force. (The Lebanese Armed Forces are around 40 per cent Shia and would almost certainly fall apart should such an effort be commenced. They are also, in any case, militarily weaker than the terror group). Hezbollah, equally obviously, has no intention of voluntarily disarming. The Lebanese government wants an end to Israel’s attacks on its soil, while also avoiding confronting the terror group. Israel is unlikely to be interested in such an arrangement for as long as Iran and Hezbollah remain committed to their long war for the Jewish state’s destruction.

From this point of view, it is a mistake to consider the events in Iran, Israel, Iraq, Hormuz and Lebanon since 28 February as constituting a ‘war’. Rather, they are a round of fighting in a much longer conflict that has been under way for decades and is likely to end only when the regime in Tehran falls. Short of that, prepare for more of the same.

It’s worth reminding ourselves, when discussing Hezbollah and Lebanon, that UNIFIL – United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon – has been sitting on its hands for decades now as a supposed international peace-keeping force. It plays a similar role as UNRWA does in Gaza – that is, it has a symbiotic relationship with Hezbollah, just as UNRWA has with Hamas. See here:

Hezbollah has been the dominant force in Lebanon for many years, with the Lebanese government and UNIFIL standing idly by, as the Iranian funded Hezbollah continued building huge underground launch sites on the Israeli border, contrary to the very Agreement UNIFIL were supposedly there to enforce. Indeed, by October 2023, UNIFIL had become no more than enthusiastic spectators, as Hezbollah launched their daily attacks on Israel, intervening only later to shoot down Israeli surveillance drones in the area.

Also Tony Badran in Tablet Magazine, from November 2024.

UNIFIL, in its current iteration, was given a mandate in 2006 via U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 to help ensure that the area south of the Litani River would remain free of any armed presence save its own and that of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). Resolution 1701 was ostensibly meant to end the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war on terms that would prevent the Lebanese-based terror army from launching more attacks against Israel by giving the Israelis a demilitarized zone on their northern border enforced by international troops. The catch was that UNIFIL would implement its mandate in support of and in coordination with the Lebanese government and the LAF—which are both controlled by Hezbollah. Rather than decrease Hezbollah’s strength on Israel’s border, the group’s armed presence south of the Litani grew exponentially under UNIFIL’s oversight.

Just how blatantly Hezbollah operated with UNIFIL’s blessing became clear after Israel launched its invasion of southern Lebanon on Sept. 30. IDF units operating close to Israel’s northern border uncovered the openings of elaborate, large-scale Hezbollah tunnel networks a few yards away from UNIFIL positions. It was clearly impossible for UNIFIL commanders not to have been fully aware of the construction of those positions and their use by large squads of armed Hezbollah militants who moved in and out. Needless to say, the construction and deployment of Hezbollah’s tunnel network, which made a mockery of UNIFIL’s supposed role in demilitarizing southern Lebanon, was never reported back to the U.N. through official channels or made public. Instead, UNIFIL paid local Hezbollah operatives and supporters to act as contractors and provide other services, essentially melding its functions with those of the terrorist army for which it was providing cover.

Jesus Christ.

Oh no, sorry, it’s Donald Trump.

President Trump has posted an AI-generated image seemingly depicting himself as Jesus Christ as he attacked the Pope for not supporting his war in Iran.

Tim Black at Spiked on Sayyid Qutb: the godfather of Islamism, and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood after the First World War:

In Europe, the collapse of the pre-war liberal order fuelled radical vanguardism, be it Communist, fascist or modernist. The colonial metropoles witnessed a similar political and cultural insurgency, refracted through a more explicitly anti-Western, anti-imperial lens and framed in national, cultural terms. Nowhere more so than in Cairo, in British-occupied Egypt, where young and young-ish radicals challenged the status quo. It was in this context that Islam was effectively and implicitly repurposed as an ideology – indeed, as an –ism to sit alongside the others that were flourishing in Europe and elsewhere during this period.

This was not Islam as a set of devotional practices. This was Islam as a revolutionary solution to the perceived failure of Western, liberal modernity. Its advocates no longer measured their faith against Christianity. They pitched it into battle against liberalism and capitalism, as a revolutionary challenge to the liberal order to rival that of fascism or Communism – the latter being a political creed that Islamists dismissed as just another outgrowth of godless Western rationalism.

The creation of the Society of Muslim Brothers (otherwise known as the Muslim Brotherhood) in Cairo in 1928 is the key moment. Its founder, a then 22-year-old teacher called Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), gave Islamism its first organisational form. But it is in the later work of Banna’s contemporary, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian teacher and civil servant, that Islamism gained arguably its most influential and explosive articulation. In the multi-volume In the Shade of the Koran (1951-1965) and, above all, in Milestones (1964), Qutb presented Islam as a political order (Nizam), indeed, as ‘the only system’ capable of rescuing mankind from the spiritless descent of ‘Western civilisation’.

Since the goal of the radical left has long been, similarly, to rescue mankind from the spiritless descent of ‘Western civilisation’, the current red-green alliance becomes easier to understand. The enemy of my enemy….

Though wrought from the scenery, symbolism and parables of the Koran, Qutb’s Islam was also modern and revolutionary. He reimagined the first Muslims as professional, vanguardist revolutionaries. He reapplied the ancient era of ‘Jahiliyyah’, the pre-Islamic ‘age of ignorance’, to the present-day world. And he recast the ‘crusaders’ of America and Europe – and, above all, ‘Zionists’ and ‘world Jewry’ – as Islam’s cosmic, evil-doing enemies. He drew Manichean battle lines and pledged war on the unbelievers. As political scientist Bassam Tibi has it in Islamism and Islam (2012), Qutb is ‘the rector spiritus of political Islam’, the figure ‘who first interpreted jihad as an “Islamic world revolution” in the pursuit of an Islamic world order’.

And here we are.

Much has been written of Qutb’s immersion in the Koran, and of his affinity with the spiritual richness of his rural upbringing (captured in his 1946 work, A Child from the Village). But Qutb’s worldview was also nourished by Western cultural sources. Like al-Ayadd, he drew deep on the social protests of Romanticism, and its appeal to more authentic sources of experience. Like many of his generation, he also inhaled the darker, reactionary fumes of the later anti-Enlightenment turn among many European thinkers, writers and artists, from the end of the 19th century into the 20th century. He saw something valuable in their critiques of reason, autonomy and universalism in the name of feeling, crowd psychology and cultural particularism. He was familiar with Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1922), and above all Alexis Carrel’s Man the Unknown (1935), a jeremiad about the deadening effects of Western rationalism on man, which he quotes at length in his work. All this captures something important about the development of Islamism – it drew just as much on a distinctly Western counter-Enlightenment tradition, especially its radically reactionary descent, as it did on Egyptian or Islamic sources. Indeed, the affinity of large parts of today’s degenerate Western left with Islamism rests partially on the extent to which they both draw intellectually from the same reactionary well.…

And now Islamism’s toxic combination of anti-Westernism and anti-Zionism seems to have seduced swathes of the Western left, too.

Continuing the saga of Bridget Phillipson and her refusal to do anything about single-sex spaces, one year after the Supreme Court judgement – as called out by Baroness Falkner yesterday. New from the Telegraph – Phillipson ‘refuses to meet’ women who secured Supreme Court trans ruling

Bridget Phillipson has been accused of refusing to meet the women who secured the milestone Supreme Court trans ruling.

For Women Scotland said its attempt to arrange a meeting with the women and equalities minister to mark the first anniversary of the decision had been “blocked”.

Susan Smith, one of the FWS directors, urged Sir Keir Starmer to intervene, telling The Telegraph that Ms Phillipson’s failure to agree to talks was “outrageous”.

She added: “We’re really disappointed that Phillipson has not met with us yet. I don’t know whether it’s being blocked by Phillipson or the Civil Service.

“Somebody, somewhere does not want to meet us – it’s outrageous. I cannot believe we cannot get her in the same room as us. We cannot get through [despite] having won the case.”

Phillipson would be too embarrassed to meet them. They see right through her and her disgraceful procrastinations.

Update:

We are pleased to report that Ms Phillipson has now offered a meeting. https://t.co/eHuZzSHYSX

— For Women Scotland (@ForWomenScot) April 13, 2026

Transgender singer Ethel Cain's defiant explicit photos have sparked conversation online. https://t.co/Tp6MREcKcK

— Out Magazine (@outmagazine) April 11, 2026

The artistic photographs, posted the day after Trans Day of Visibility, have been given a “sensitive content” warning by Instagram, but have been left up on the social media site, despite showing Cain’s genitalia while she stares into the camera.

At a time when trans bodies are being policed like never before, and politicians are doing everything in their power to strip transgender people of their rights, it feels refreshingly liberating to show the full breadth of the same kind of trans body the Republican Party is trying to criminalize.

The photos are not overtly sexual, instead they lean into femininity, with a floral bedspread and draped curtains in the background. Other photos in the carousel show Cain in the same corset, but also wearing tight white shorts.

See also: “The feminine penis is different than the masculine penis”.

Only a decade ago, this was rhetoric that was exclusively found within Neo-Nazi circles https://t.co/P3VFLq2b4i

— David Toube (@davidtoube) April 11, 2026

The indefatigable Baroness Falkner strikes again. From the Telegraph:

Bridget Phillipson has been accused of blocking guidance on upholding women’s right to single-sex spaces over fears that it could damage her career.

Baroness Falkner – who drew up the equality law changes – said Ms Phillipson was putting her “personal ambition” before her role as women and equalities minister over fears that pro-trans backbenchers would scupper any chance of promotion if she published the guidance.

Thursday will mark the first anniversary of the Supreme Court judgment on the definition of a woman, which ruled that trans women are not legally women for the purposes of the Equality Act.

In a devastating attack on what she described as the Government’s “cowardice”, Lady Falkner said the delay “betrayed” women who have a right to expect that trans women – biological men – are barred from female toilets and changing rooms.

The peer also accused Sir Keir Starmer of failing to uphold the law on women’s spaces despite being a lawyer himself.

Lady Falkner, who led the Equality and Human Rights Commission until November, suggested the Government risked making the same mistake over trans rights that it did with grooming gangs by failing to take action for fear of upsetting a minority group.

She’s not wrong.

Interview here.

“For some months now, we’ve been hearing speculation about whether the Prime Minister will continue to be in place, or whether there’s going to be a major reshuffle,” says Falkner. “[Phillipson] is ever ambitious, and I suspect that she doesn’t want to alienate the activist MPs in her party by showing her hand. She was set back by being defeated in her quest to be deputy leader of the party, and she is putting her personal ambition ahead of her role as the minister for women and equalities. That is a very sad and sorry state of affairs for our country in terms of the message it sends about this Government.”….

And she believes the rot goes right to the top, to Keir Starmer: “You have a Government led by a lawyer, yet he’s unable to uphold the law in its most visible form, which is statutory guidance produced by a regulator – an independent regulator – of that law.”….

“Britain is, in many ways, at a crossroads with the fragmentation of politics,” she says. “There has to be a long, deep reflection on whether we’re going to continue as a society to uphold what I call muscular liberalism: in that we balance rights, everybody’s rights, properly, and are not afraid of calling out wrongdoing because we’re intimidated by upsetting one group or another.”

From the Telegraph:

The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, County Durham, tells visitors that “gender fluidity” was a feature of 19th-century childhoods because some boys wore dresses up to the age of eight.

A leaflet produced by the museum claims the fashion trend – known as breeching – was equivalent to the modern phenomenon of gender nonconformity.

Oh god. It was the fashion then. Far from being a statement about gender fluidity, it was a practical solution to to the problem of faecal fluidity, as it would have been easier then, before the days of elastic, to pull off the breeches rather than unbutton a pair of trousers every time a nappy needed changing. Can we please stop it with this ahistorical nonsense?

The LGBTQIA+ leaflet is offered to visitors at the museum and art gallery, which opened in 1892, and contains pictures of two boys’ dresses dating to the 19th century.

“It’s often assumed that gender binaries (the classification of gender into two opposing categories: male and female) have always been strictly enforced and that gender fluidity is a recent development,” it reads.

“However, this is not true. Throughout history, gender distinctions in children’s clothing were less rigid, especially in early childhood.

“Both boys and girls commonly wore dresses during infancy and toddlerhood for practical reasons. The transition from dresses to trousers, known as ‘breeching’, marked an important cultural milestone for boys, typically occurring between ages four and seven, depending on family traditions.”

And depending on the success or otherwise of toilet training.

Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, told The Telegraph: “The idea that Victorian children were ‘gender fluid’ because of practicalities relating to clothing is absolute nonsense.

“The so-called ‘opposing categories’ of male and female, as the museum puts it, are to do with biology and have nothing to do with little boys wearing dresses instead of trousers because elastic was a brand new invention and not widely used.

“This is the latest example of the cultural sector desperately rewriting history to pretend that the fantasies of gender ideologues aren’t a modern invention.”

Your latest Green Party candidate – from the JC:

The husband of Loose Women star Nadia Sawalha, who is a Green Party local election candidate in south London, has ranted about “the chosen people” posing the biggest threat to the planet, the JC can reveal. 

Mark Adderley, who is standing in Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood, also suggested some drones fired at Gulf states could be Israeli “false flag” attacks and blamed Benjamin Netanyahu for the Hatzola ambulance attack.

In a video titled “true cause of the anti-semitic [sic] ambulance attack,” Adderley attributed responsibility for last month’s attack on Hatzola ambulances in north London to the Israeli prime minister.

“To what extent has Benjamin Netanyahu made the lives of Jewish people all over the world more dangerous by committing a genocide?” Adderley asked.

In the caption, he added: “Benjamin Netanyahu is single-handedly responsible for endangering the lives of Jewish People THROUGHOUT the WORLD … and just for the record … if a Muslim community had their own Ambulance service we would have never heard the end of it …”

Five people have now been arrested in connection with the arson attack, which police are treating as an antisemitic hate crime.

It comes as another Green Party candidate in London reportedly withdrew from local elections after sharing a conspiracy theory about the same incident.

Tope Olawoyin, posting on her now-private X account, allegedly wrote: “I can say with almost absolute certainty that the men arrested are white, probably even Jewish, because we all know for a fact that if they weren’t their names and pictures would be EVERYWHERE.”

There seems to be something of a pattern here.

The dark side of Los Angeles. Photos from Daniel Sackheim:

_{[All images © Daniel Sackheim]}

From his book The City Unseen.