Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • At the World Decolonization Forum

    Will the Armenians have their ancient lands restored to them, or receive reparations for the genocide inflicted on them in 1915?

    The Kurds given the right of self-determination?

    The ancient Greek regions returned?

    Will the 1974 Turkish invasion and occupation of Northern Cyprus be reversed?

    Will the descendants of Jewish families who fled Kemalist policies of forced assimilation be given compensation?

    Will the Hagia Sophia be returned the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, from whom it was stolen?

    Will there be a truth & reconciliation project recognizing the millions of slaves taken & trafficked by the Ottoman Empire, particularly the countless boys kidnapped from Balkan Christian families for forced military service?

    Will compensation be given to Christians for the hundred of Churches and monasteries destroyed?

    The possibilities for Turkish decolonization are endless.

    That “Decolonization” plan:

    Their alliance is not advocating for a world without the West, rather, there is an open invitation for the West to accept its own “decolonization”.

    The current centers of knowledge located in Paris, London, Amsterdam. And New York; need to be replaced by new centers in Istanbul, Jakarta, Addis Abbaba [sic], Rabat, Cairo, and Gaza.

  • Echoing Mamdani

  • Silenced No More

    It’s just words on a page, but it leaves enough to the imagination to be even more horrific than the video. At least for me.

    In the 47-minute compilation, there is some evidence of sexual sadism, but not much. Probably for two reasons: proud though Hamas was of massacring Jews, they were less keen on broadcasting scenes of sexual depravity. And the Israeli government likely declined to include the most horrific footage out of respect for the victims.

    The report is exhaustively documented, horror story after horror story. I’ve read it only once, and I won’t do so again. Especially the sections about the Nova festival are extremely disturbing. So I asked Claude to summarize the documented patterns in the report:

    – Rape and gang rape, with victims passed between attackers in sequence, witnesses describing laughter throughout

    – Targeted gunshots to groin, abdomen, buttocks and face; genital mutilation of both women and men

    – Rape followed by execution—victims shot or stabbed immediately afterward, some shot in the head during the assault

    – Rape continuing after victims were dead

    – Sexual mutilation—breasts severed, genitals cut off or shot

    – Burning, including deliberate burning of the groin; bodies set alight with accelerants – – Hands bound behind backs; bodies tied to trees and poles along the road

    – Sharp objects inserted into victims’ genitals – Women raped in view of their desperate partners, who were then killed

    – Male victims gang-raped, beaten, and threatened with castration

    – Dismemberment and decapitation

    These findings of systematic sexual violence and torture are corroborated by the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict (2024) and the UN Commission of Inquiry (2024). Just one quote from a survivor:

    “I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams—screams you have never heard anywhere. It’s between silence and screams, between pain and wanting to die. These are screams… it’s something I have never heard in my life, and I have no way to explain to you what it sounds like. But it’s screams. It’s screams. It was simply horrific. And after one finished, he told another to go up ‘Ta’al’ [in Arabic], like to the next one. And apparently there was a round… And after they finished, they shot her.” She continued: “You hear the screams, and then you hear silence. You hear a bang—and silence. And then there’s a kind of calm. And then you say: okay, it’s over at least. She’s done with it. And like that with each person they abused—you heard. The moment they were killed, I said, ‘Oh my God, finally, it’s over.’”

    You privileged Westerners have no idea how you would react if this happened to you and your loved ones—if a group committed these atrocities, vowed to repeat them again and again, and openly declared that it would not stop until your country no longer existed. You have no idea.

    Report here.

  • Spiteful gesture politics

    The twinning happened because Hackney’s large Jewish community had family and personal links there. Haifa is a famously left-wing city (ironically the Israeli Greens are quite strong there) that is a model for coexistence between Jews and Arabs. The twinning arrangement includes medical exchanges between the Homerton and Rambam hospitals. If you want peace between Israel and the Palestinians you should support initiatives that bring people together and create understanding, not cancel or boycott them.

  • Clueless in Whitehall

    Jonathan Sacerdoti on our hapless new Defence Secretary – Wes Streeting is clueless about Israel:

    As Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, in his first speech as head of the terrorist group’s political bureau, promised to ‘continue on the same path and footsteps as before, carrying the banner high, until it flies over Al-Aqsa (Jerusalem) and the lands of a free and proud Palestine,’ Britain’s new Defence Secretary was also making his own promises to diminish Israel.

    Just two days into his new job, Wesley Streeting declared that he ‘fear[s] Israel has fallen short’ of British military standards in Gaza. It is an extraordinary claim from a man who has been in the job barely long enough to set up his computer login, but long enough to have attracted the criticism of former army chief Richard Dannatt, who said Streeting ‘knows pretty much the square root of nothing about defence’.

    As Britain adjusts to its new Prime Minister and his new choice for Defence Secretary, Hamas is also under new leadership, with al-Hayya promising the terrorist group will ‘continue to act across all fronts for Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem.’ When it comes to their policy on Israel, Messers Streeting and Burnham seem determined to do the same, following on from Keir Starmer’s decision to ‘recognise’ a Palestinian state which has no defined borders, population or just about any other required feature of statehood. No matter: it is Israel which has ‘fallen short’ and must be punished. The invaders of October 7th shall reap the rewards of British recognition and a tsunami of British taxpayer money in aid.

    Meanwhile, in the real world:

    The government’s wider position is equally difficult to defend. Before taking office, Andrew Burnham praised restrictions intended to ensure that ‘no British bombs or bullets can be used by the IDF in Gaza or in the West Bank’. Streeting hinted at more to come. It is a pleasing slogan for Labour activists. Strategically, it is almost comically detached from reality.

    Britain supplies less than 1 per cent of Israel’s defence imports. Israel, meanwhile, has overtaken Britain as the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter and accounts for 8.2 per cent of British arms purchases, second only to the United States.

    The dependence runs through Britain’s armed forces. The British Army’s Watchkeeper drone is heavily based on Elbit’s Hermes 450 platform. The Ministry of Defence has acquired IAI-designed Jaguar remote patrol vehicles. Elbit Systems UK supplies thermal sights, radar components and synthetic training systems used to train tens of thousands of British soldiers….

    It is entirely understandable why a weak and scared Labour government would start to tiptoe down this slippery slope, gradually building up a momentum until they are hurtling towards a constantly moving finish-line of ever harsher condemnations and the eventual ostracism of Israel. For them, it is the path of least resistance. It is also morally wrong, because Israel is a state fighting for its survival after an unprecedented invasion of 6,000 Palestinians set off a regional war aimed at its destruction….

    Israel this week raised its alert level to its highest since Operation Roaring Lion, as the United States looks to be preparing a major escalation of its military campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran in the coming days. Britain should be preparing to support Israel in this decisive moment, not throwing it under the bus.

  • What Are You Afraid Of?

    Maarten Boudry on speaking up for Jews

    If you are Jewish yourself, of course you have plenty to be afraid of. I hope I don’t need to remind you of the draconian safety measures Jews now have to take all across Europe. This was already the case long before 7 October, but it has intensified since. Jewish schools, synagogues and kindergartens look like military fortresses.

    Jews are being pushed out of academia and civic life unless they prostrate themselves before the activist mob and ritually denounce Israel — the one country that can realistically protect them against exactly this sort of antisemitism. Many Jewish academics have been boycotted or hounded off campus, or have left academia altogether in a mixture of despair and disgust.

    All across the West, as Hana Raviyt Schank wrote in Future of Jewish, Jews are being “pushed out of civic life” — taking their surnames off mailboxes, changing their names on delivery apps, removing the mezuzah from the doorpost. If even a tenth of this were happening to Muslim minorities, you’d never hear the end of it. But since it is only Jews, hardly anyone cares….

    But what are regular—goyim—academics and public intellectuals afraid of? No secret police is going to drag them out of bed in the middle of the night, and nobody is going to slip polonium into their tea.

    Well no, but the pressure is on to conform – and to confirm others in their righteous hatred of Jews Zionists.

    The punishment is not so much physical as social and professional.

    Just to give you an idea, here is a sample of what I have experienced personally over the past two and a half years:

    • A friend I once helped with one of his own books now writes a steady stream of public posts about what a far-right, xenophobic, Arab-hating, Nazi-adjacent bigot I am.

    • An academic colleague who kindly blurbed one of my earlier books emailed my rector behind my back to demand that disciplinary action be taken against me for my “Zionist-tinged views”.

    • A friend whose book I once blurbed successfully had me cancelled at an organization we are both associated with, and also tried to get me fired at UGent (no worries — I had already left of my own accord).

    • A good friend of some twenty years became a father without my knowing, because he had cut off all contact.

    • Someone called my mother (!) to sternly demand an explanation for her son’s behavior.

    • A cordial colleague I had once had dinner with threw me out of his philosophical discussion group, blocked me on every social media platform, and ignored my polite emails asking for clarification.

    • I have been deplatformed twice in academia — a talk and a debate — over my “Zionist views”.

    • A talk in my hometown of Ghent was cancelled when people caught wind of my views on Gaza, even though the talk itself was completely unrelated. (Luckily they had signed a contract with my speaker’s agency, so they had to pay compensation.)

    • Asked about the limits of academic freedom, and about my case in particular, the rector of my university said that any researcher who questions the Gaza genocide is “crossing a line that must not be crossed”.

    • The president of an organization I worked with smeared me as being “paid by the Zionist lobby”, then blocked my Facebook account and my emails when I asked for a retraction.

    • I have had to promise my girlfriend that I won’t talk about Israel on television anymore, because she fears for my physical safety. (She needn’t worry: no TV program would be insane enough to invite me on that topic anyway.)…

    Needless to say, I have also pretty much ruined my career prospects in academia. But that’s fine…..

    What irks me even more than the lies about “genocide” and “apartheid” in academia is the meta-lie that parroting those lies is somehow an act of courage — that our universities and our media are controlled by an all-powerful “Zionist lobby”. (If that’s true, Jews are as incompetent at lobbying as they are at genocide.) Seriously: if you are an academic, railing against Israel is about the safest and least courageous position you can take. You will be lavished with applause, social approval, even honorary doctorates.

  • Message to Mamdani

  • The Jewish temple

    …and enslaved hundreds of 1000s of Judeans in 70ad. The Jews – the word derives from Judea – retained their link to Jerusalem and Judea….
    I opened my book Jerusalem with Titus storming the Temple and here are some pictures that illustrate these events….

    Titus’s storming of the Jewish Temple followed a brutal siege. Titus destroyed the Jewish state that had rebelled against Rome. The fallen ashlars of the Temple have been discovered. The candelabrum of the Temple was borne in Titus’s Triumph. The number of Jews enslaved led to slave prices dropping. The treasures of the Temple were so great that the emperors cld afford to build the Coliseum in Rome… Sixty years later Prince of Israel Simon Bar Kochba son of the star led a Jewish rebellion against Rome…

  • Protecting women’s sport

    Professional basketball player Sophie Cunningham is the latest woman to come out against men in women’s sport – and she seems to be making a mark. The timing’s right:

    “When it comes just to protecting young girls in sport and women in sport, I feel very strongly about that. That’s why you have Title IX.

    “That’s why you have some of the greats in women’s sports. If Title IX women’s sports weren’t protected, then you wouldn’t hear about any type of women in sport.“

    “I have never once said that I hated the trans community.”

    In her interview with ESPN, Cunningham had said:

    “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

    Why the incessant hostile questioning from men? Genevieve Gluck adds:

    It’s a humiliation ritual. It has nothing to do with whether or not she, or anyone else who holds the same position, is right.

    Trans activism is steered by men with humiliation fetishes who stir up a moral panic so they can publicly humiliate women.

  • Genocide scholars at the NYT

    The latest “genocide scholar” at the NYT is Omar Bartov (the “entering a terrifying new era” one). Benny Morris just effectively demolished his latest book at Quillette.