Mick Hartley

Trumping Ukraine

Here we go. Trump prepares to sell out Ukraine:

President Donald Trump claimed in part two of a televised interview that the nearly three-year-old war between Russia and Ukraine that started when Moscow’s forces kicked off an invasion in 2022 was the fault of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s failure to preemptively capitulate before Russian troops began their attack.

Trump made the incendiary comments in a pre-taped interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that aired Thursday on Hannity’s program....

Zelensky, he said, is “no angel” and “shouldn’t have allowed this war to happen,” even though it was Russia that invaded Ukraine.

“First of all, he’s fighting a much bigger entity, okay, much bigger. When he was, you know, talking so brave... Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful. He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal, and it would have been a deal that would have been, it would have been a nothing deal,” Trump claimed.

He added that had he been in Zelensky’s position he could have “made that deal so easily.” He claimed that it was the Ukrainian leader who decided on hostilities even though it was Putin who ordered the invasion of Ukraine...

God - Trump and his all-powerful deal-making abilities. What deal did he have in mind? Surrender how much of Ukraine? Start with 50%, and work up till Putin nods his head in agreement? 60%? No. 70%? No. 75%? OK, that's a good start...maybe we can do business here. Plus of course no more talk of an independent Ukraine. And no Ukrainian language - all Russian. And Ukrainian children to be sent off to Russia for a proper education into how Ukraine doesn't really exist as a separate country and how you're all Nazis. And a few billion dollars reparation for all the trouble of getting an army together to invade and bomb your hospitals and schools. Reducing cities to rubble doesn't come cheap. After all, remember, we're a much bigger entity than you. In fact you're not even an entity at all....

Of course this could all be Trump braggodocio. He can't resist boasting about his best-ever world-beating negotiating skills. But, as we remember from his last presidency, there's quite a gap between what he says and what he does.

Yes, he has a weakness for Putin's alpha male style - hey, two alpha males head to head negotiating about the future of Ukraine...what could be better? Apparently, though, he's reinstated the bust of Churchill in the Oval Office. Perhaps, if he glances up, he'll be reminded that taking up arms against tyranny is sometimes the only choice.

Qatar and Israel

(1/3) Steve Witkoff - Trump's man of the moment in the Middle East - noted other countries like Qatar could join the Abraham Accords if the Saudis lead the way. There are few in Israel who would oppose normalization with Qatar....

— Calev Ben-Dor (@Fathom_Editor) January 24, 2025

Full thread:

(2/3) But they remain the main sponsors of Hamas (and Al Jazeera). 2 Israelis i recently spoke to (heavily involved in peacemaking for decades) talked about the sophisticated game Qatar plays and emphasized what a bad actor it has been.

(3/3) let's hope this will change - but we shouldn't hold our breath

Qatar is where the Hamas leaders lived their billionaire lives of luxury before Israel sent them off to meet Allah. So...normalisation, perhaps, but much would need to change...

A 50-fold increase

From the Times:

The number of children in England diagnosed with gender dysphoria has risen 50-fold over the past decade, research shows.

Analysis of NHS GP records suggests that more than 10,000 under-18s identified as transgender or struggled with gender distress in 2021, up from about 200 in 2011.

Gender dysphoria describes the sense of anxiety when people feel a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity, which prompts some to take steps to transition to the opposite sex using hormonal drugs or surgery.

Since "gender identity" is a maufactured construct - an ideological construct - it's no surprise that the huge increase in so-called gender dysphoria is so closely related to its promotion on social media. There could hardly be clearer evidence that this is all a cult, on the lines of the satanic panic, or multiple personalities, - or even alien abduction, though that never really caught on. This is the biggie though: a toxic combination of postmodern Queer Theory and the old religious body/soul dualism. This is the one that's really caught on; that's left thousands of unfortunates with mutilated bodies, that allows men into women's sport, and women's prisons, and women's rape centres. That's captured institutions and even governments across the western world. 

Gender dysphoria can be a useful diagnostic term, no doubt, for the psychological condition of feeling you should somehow be the other sex, but in the past it was extremely rare. The new terminology of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) was introduced to describe this new sudden explosion - which is not a  discovery of a new medical condition which has only recently been uncovered - like, say, autism - but a term for these young kids persuaded by their time on social media that all their pubertal problems can be solved if they transition to the other sex. It's not a medical problem so much as a social contagion.

In other words, nobody's born in the wrong body.

 

Treating dissent in China

A BBC report - 'I had anti-government views so they treated me for schizophrenia':

When Zhang Junjie was 17 he decided to protest outside his university about rules made by China's government. Within days he had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital and treated for schizophrenia.

Junjie is one of dozens of people identified by the BBC who were hospitalised after protesting or complaining to the authorities.

Many people we spoke to were given anti-psychotic drugs, and in some cases electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), without their consent.

While there have been reports for decades that hospitalisation is used in China as a way of detaining dissenting citizens without involving the courts, a leading Chinese lawyer has told the BBC that the issue - which legislation sought to resolve - has recently seen a resurgence.

Junjie says he was restrained and beaten by hospital staff before being forced to take medication....

"The doctors told me I had a very serious mental disease… Then they tied me to a bed. The nurses and doctors repeatedly told me, because of my views on the party and the government, then I must be mentally ill. It was terrifying," he told the BBC World Service. He was there for 12 days.

He's not the only one, of course.

An activist called Jie Lijian told us he had been treated for mental illness without his consent in 2018.

Lijian says he was arrested for attending a protest demanding better pay at a factory. He says police interrogated him for three days before taking him to a psychiatric hospital.

Like Junjie, Lijian says he was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs that impaired his critical thinking.

After a week in the hospital, he says he refused any more medication. After fighting with staff, and being told he was causing trouble, Lijian was sent for ECT - a therapy which involves passing electric currents through a patient's brain.

"The pain was from head to toe. My whole body felt like it wasn't my own. It was really painful. Electric shock on. Then off. Electric shock on. Then off. I fainted several times. I felt like I was dying," he says.

He says he was discharged after 52 days. He now has a part-time job in Los Angeles and is seeking asylum in the US.

The October 7th aftermath

Melanie Phillips interviewed at Spiked on October 7th and its aftermath:

This was not just murdering Jews or murdering Israelis. This was the seeking out of Jews and Israelis. It was almost like a kind of ritual mutilation. Hamas militants beheaded some of them. They burned some of them alive. They tortured them. They raped them, both men and women. This was bestial and depraved behaviour and a level of sadism that Jews collectively remember from the Holocaust. And while we should not compare anything to the Holocaust, because it was sui generis in both scale and nature, this had very clear parallels and resonances.

The second terrible shock was simply the awfulness of what happened – the murders, the rapes, the beheadings, the burnings alive, the slaughter of children in front of their parents. Then, of course, there was the abduction of the hostages into Gaza. There was the sight of both militants and ordinary – if I can call them that – people exulting over all this and abusing the hostages, whether they were dead or alive.

The next terrible thing that happened was the aftermath. One would have expected, in a civilised world, that the West would have stood with Israel. But it turned on Israel. It represented everything Israel did to defend itself as aggressive, and completely ignored the fact that Israel was going to unprecedented lengths to preserve the lives of civilians. As if that wasn’t bad enough, an absolute tsunami of anti-Jewish hatred swept across Britain and the West.

That, for those of us watching from outside, in the UK and the west, was surely the most extraordinary thing. We knew about the vicious hatred against Israel and the Jews across the Muslim Middle East, and particularly in Gaza under Hamas, where the children are taught Jew-hate in UNRWA schools and the regime spends all its energy on the infrastructure for attacking and destroying the "Zionist entity". But to see the explosion of sheer naked antisemitism across the west, in marches for Free Palestine, across universities - that's been just shocking. Even supposedly serious organisations like Amnesty International joined in with the "genocide" accusation against Israel - an absurdity loaded with a calculated and profoundly offensive antisemitic insult against the people who experienced the Holocaust, where the term "genocide" was first coined. As though at last the guilt could be thrown off and hurled back at the Jews for their inexcusable role as victims in the worst crime in history.

There is also something much deeper and much darker behind anti-Zionism. One of the most troubling things, post-7 October, was the business of the Israeli hostages and the attitude of so many people in the West towards them. These hostages included mainly women and small children, but also some men and elderly people. In London and other cities across the West, posters depicting those hostages were posted up in various public places, and we saw that they were torn down. As fast as they were torn down, they were put up. And as fast as they were put up again, they were torn back down.

It was an astonishing thing to see that the faces of the people who were tearing the posters down were very often convulsed with hatred and rage. They were not protesting against Israel. They were tearing down images of innocents who were kidnapped and, in some cases, slaughtered, tortured or lost to a terrible, unknown fate. Why does that fill them with such murderous rage?

What were they tearing down? They weren’t just tearing down pictures of Israeli hostages. They were tearing out the Jews from their heads, from their conscience and from their world. They wanted the Jews gone.

That, to me, is what has been going on in the West in certain circles. I don’t wish to exaggerate it, but we’ve had these massive ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations going on all the time. Nobody, apart from Jews and supporters of Israel, has asked what abomination we are seeing here.

We’re seeing a mass movement against Jews, Judaism and Israel. I say all three of those together because of the nature of these protests – what’s being chanted, the banners, the relentlessness of it, the obsession. We’re seeing something very much darker and deeper. There is no other cause in history where the West has behaved like this.

On the Heath

More trees, plus Henry Moore at Kenwood. That second image: I thought for a moment it was a carving - an angel or devil, perhaps - but no, just a natural break.

Contradicting the party’s guidelines for socialist construction

Trouble at the nuclear power plant. In North Korea “failing to successfully complete their project and close the gap with international technological standards” warrants a public execution:

North Korean authorities have executed and imprisoned several key researchers involved in nuclear power plant construction, Daily NK has learned.

According to a Pyongyang source speaking to Daily NK on Tuesday, two senior researchers were executed and four junior researchers were punished for “failing to successfully complete their project and close the gap with international technological standards.”

The executions took place at 4 p.m. on Jan. 10 in an empty lot along Nampo road in Pyongyang’s Mangyongdae District. All staff connected to the nuclear power plant construction project were required to witness the event. While the two senior researchers were executed on site, the four junior researchers were transported to an undisclosed location, believed to be a political prison camp.

The executed senior researchers were officials from the Ministry of Atomic Energy Industry’s technology division, responsible for developing reactor design and operation technology. They were reportedly held accountable for failing to meet technical targets set by the Central Committee.

The issue came to a head during December’s 11th Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, where officials condemned the researchers for “willful neglect” and “defeatism.” They were particularly criticized for claiming certain tasks were “too hard to achieve given our capabilities” – a stance deemed unacceptable given that nuclear power plant construction is central to addressing North Korea’s chronic electricity shortage.

The Cabinet, Central Public Prosecutor’s Office, and Ministry of Social Security branded them “anti-party figures” who had “contradicted the party’s guidelines for socialist construction.”

However, other researchers in the field suggest the punishments were excessive...

you think?

....noting that the failures stemmed from resource shortages and technical limitations rather than lack of commitment. The source indicated that the executed researchers had been dedicated to their work and had openly communicated challenges to the Workers’ Party. Their fate has dampened morale among remaining staff.

In the aftermath, the Ministry of Atomic Energy Industry has appointed a new research team to lead the project, with the Central Committee mandating increased party oversight of technological research and development.

Increasing party oversight of technological research and development? That'll work.

"The damn-fool Democrats handed truth to their worst enemy"

Janice Turner sums up the Democrat debacle, as they happily disappear up their own backsides and out of power in pursuit of the gender fantasy:

Last week the US House of Representatives passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. One by one, Republicans rose to make the simple point that as parents or grandparents of female track stars or soccer players they thought it unfair, and in some cases dangerous, for girls to compete against male-bodied athletes.

To any Floridian football fan or Montanan marathon runner, this was an unarguable truth. Yet all Democrats (except two from Texas) opposed the bill, rebranding it the “child predator empowerment act” and arguing it would lead to the appointment of genital inspectors — “Taliban-like enforcers” and paedophiles — to look inside the underwear of girls as young as four.

If that sounds deranged, it’s because it was. But what else did the Democrats have? They couldn’t dispute biological advantage or fairness, so they ended up sounding like QAnon loons.

None of this matters now President Trump has signed Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, the executive order that got the loudest cheer from the inauguration crowd. This ticks the entire gender critical wish-list, from fair school sports to removing rapists from women’s prisons and categorically defining woman as an “adult human female”.

Liberals will cry culture war — although they didn’t on President Biden’s first day when his executive order replaced “sex” with “gender identity” in Title IX policy, in effect abolishing women’s rights. Or in 2022 when the White House “lesbian visibility day” was led by Charlotte Clymer and Rachel Levine, both straight biological males. Or when Nancy Pelosi supported the abolition of the word “mother” from House rules.

It takes two to fight a culture war. And on the gender front the Democrats lost. Why? Because they moved beyond fighting for legitimate trans rights — freedom from violence or discrimination at work — into fantastical thinking....

Trump’s executive order states: “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.” The damn-fool Democrats handed truth to their worst enemy. Can they ever win it back?

It doesn't look promising. If the Dems make this one of their main fight-back platforms - their hill to die on, as it were - then they'll be handing Trump all he needs to stay in power.

Arab denial of citizenship to Palestinians

After yesterday's Daniel Finkelstein article on accepting the past, here's a letter in the Times this morning making another crucial point: the denial of citizenship to Palestinians by most Arab states:

Daniel Finkelstein’s poignant reflection on Villa Finkelstein highlights a crucial inconsistency. Under UNRWA’s definition of refugee status, which (unlike the UN high commissioner for refugees definition) includes all descendants in perpetuity, Finkelstein and his children would qualify as refugees from Lviv, despite their successful life in Britain.

This definition has helped to perpetuate rather than resolve the conflict. While Finkelstein accepts historical change, UNRWA’s approach has fostered an illusion of return that impedes efforts to create a lasting peace. Equally troubling is the stark contrast between the Finkelstein family’s integration in Britain and the denial of citizenship to Palestinians by most Arab states. Millions remain in limbo after 75 years.

Lebanon, Syria and others have kept Palestinians in segregated communities, refusing them basic rights while claiming to champion their cause. True solidarity with Palestinians means confronting these uncomfortable realities. A lasting peace requires not only a willingness by Israel to make territorial compromises but also reform of UNRWA and full citizenship rights for Palestinians in Arab countries where they have lived for generations.

Despite all the talk of Arab nationalism, with a shared common culture and language, citizenship for Palestinian refugees has been denied for one reason only: to pressure Israel, and sustain the illusion that the "Zionist state" is a temporary blight which will soon disappear. 

Wetlands

Walthamstow:

Defeating gender-identity ideology

Sex Matters welcomes US President Trump’s Executive Order reaffirming the legal status of the two sexes, male and female, across America’s federal government. pic.twitter.com/P4A5llqecm

— Sex Matters (@SexMattersOrg) January 22, 2025

Accepting the past

Daniel Finkelstein in the Times - Key to Middle East peace is accepting the past. His fine family home, built by his grandfather in 1938, stands at the top of a hill in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, formerly Lwow, formerly Limburg, He's not expecting it back any time soon.

What I don’t think I could reasonably expect is that if I embarked on a march through central London demanding my home back I would turn round and find many people following me. Even (or perhaps especially) Jeremy Corbyn. And you can’t organise a march through central London without him.

It is not only the home that has gone. When Lviv was Lwow it was a multi-ethnic city, shared by Jews, ethnic Poles and Ukrainians. After the war ended, part of Germany became Poland and part of Poland (the part with Lviv in it) became Ukraine. The remaining Poles moved out and there were hardly any Jews any more.

For me to insist that the boundaries of Germany be redrawn to match those of 1939, followed by the boundaries of Poland and Ukraine, would clearly be absurd. As it would be for me to ask that all the property rules for 85 years in Lviv be overturned, allowing people to move back into property once owned by their grandparents.

The parallels with Palestine and the Middle East are obvious enough.

For decades, the Palestinians and their allies have launched wars they then lose and complain to everyone about losing. It never seems to strike them that a better idea might be not to launch these wars.

In the West, the various campaigns that express solidarity to Palestinians are not, in fact, showing them any solidarity at all. They have their own agenda about their own power and status and which uses Palestinians as a rhetorical prop. And they are misleading the people they pretend to support. They are like a friend who would advise me to throw up my life, pick up a gun and go and invade Lviv by myself in the name of Marshal Pilsudski and his brigades of Polish legionnaires.

These western-based supporters provide solidarity only for the most violent rejectionists and leave bereft those people in Palestine itself who might be willing to come to terms with both reality and Israel. For as long as Palestinians hold out hope that there will be a Palestine “from the river to the sea” there will be war and death, however hard we all work to prevent such calamities, such horror.

Any protester chanting this slogan is encouraging others to go to their death, and to go and kill innocent people, while themselves promising only to write a cross message on a piece of cardboard and wave it outside the Garfunkel’s restaurant near Trafalgar Square.

Unfortunately at the moment it's doubtful that "those people in Palestine itself who might be willing to come to terms with both reality and Israel" number more than a handful. For that we must thank not only radical Islam and Hamas and Iran, but also UNRWA, and the tens of thousnds of Free Palestine marchers and students across the West.

Also, of course, it's not just the Palestinians displaced in the course of Israel's founding. That was just one factor in the general "ethnic cleansings" of the last century. There's also the equivalent number - possibly more - of Jews displaced from the Middle East and North Africa, where they'd lived for thousands of years before their expulsion. Not to mention Greeks/Turks, Indians/Pakistanis, Germans expelled from Poland, etc. etc.. All forgotten and resolved - apart from this one exception...

The knife distraction

Headlines everywhere about the danger of buying knives:

People trying to buy knives online will face tougher measures to prove their age under new restrictions being brought forward in the wake of the Southport knife attack.

Axel Rudakubana, who has admitted murdering three young girls last July, bought a knife from Amazon when he was just 17, despite existing laws which prohibit the sale of most knives to under-18s.

Online retailers will be forced to ask anyone buying a knife for two types of identification under government plans, with buyers asked to submit an identity document, such as a passport, and record a live video to prove their age.

Amazon has said it takes its "responsibility around the sale of all age-restricted items - including bladed products - extremely seriously" and has launched an investigation.

In an opinion piece for The Sun newspaper, external, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer wrote that it "remains shockingly easy for our children to get their hands on deadly knives".

"The lessons of this case could not be clearer," he said.

"Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them.

"And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue."

The lessons of this case could indeed not be clearer. It's about people getting radicalised by Islamist ideology, and the failure of the government agencies such as Prevent to do their jobs. It's also about the determination of the government not to confront the problem but to do everything in its power to throw up distractions like this. Yes, fine, make it harder for kids to get knives - but every kitchen has big sharp knives.

They're not the hardest objects to get hold of. They're not guns.

Pennsylvania Railroad 1935

John S. Powell, "Philadelphia area circa 1935. Pennsylvania Railroad Locomotive PRR 6757."

[Photo: Shorpy/John S. Powell, Louis A. Marre Rail Transportation Photograph Collection]

BBC News

I just watched @BBC 6-o-clock news. In a fairly extensive coverage of Trump’s first day, the Executive Order pardoning Jan 6th rioters was discussed at length. There was mention of the withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, plans to leave WHO, and plans to curb immigration.…

— Bev Jackson (@BevJacksonAuth) January 21, 2025

"...Not one word about the most popular Executive Order: the acknowledgment of binary sex and the dismantlement of the entire apparatus of gender identity doctrine that has trashed women’s rights, negated LGB rights, and undermined child safeguarding.

"It was this issue, more than any other, that swayed swing voters to switch from Democrat to Republican, and it led millions of lifelong Democrats to stay home in November. But the @BBC - once again - doesn’t think it worth mentioning.

"Shame on you, @BBC !"