Mick Hartley

An act of blatant prejudice

This seems typical of what I imagine the Arts Council - and indeed so many similar public institutions - to be like. They try painfully hard to be all-inclusive and gender-friendly and ethnically aware - to the point of a painfully "woke" selection of gender classifications, and an alarming obsession with racial classification. Yet they miss out on one important, historically significant, and very telling detail. Norman Lebrecht in the JC:

Arts organisations have sent me copies of a questionnaire they are expected to fill out about their staff before they can pass the first threshold for subsidy. The questions are so brutally personal that anywhere but the public sector they’d get the interrogator charged with privacy violation. But this is Whitehall and we’re talking money, so here’s what arts managers are required to disclose.

“Please select your gender identity”. There are four options: “Female (including trans women), Male (including trans men), Non-binary (e.g. androgyne)” and “prefer not to say”. Some applicants cross out the last line and write “I’ve never looked”. Seriously, though, does Whitehall need to know?

Next question: “Is your gender identity different to the sex you were assigned at birth?” Well, who can remember that? If it weren’t for the circumcision, I’d be stumped for an answer.

“Please select your sexual orientation,” the form continues, with a whole ice-cream menu of options that I won’t splash across your Friday-night dinner-table for fear of mixing one dubious streak with another. I’m advising colleagues to write in mango with raspberry ripple, which seems vaguely neutral and even a little creative.

But this is where it gets distinctly sticky and a touch sinister for Jews. “Please select your ethnicity,” demands the Arts Council. Eighteen different options are available, starting with White British, White Irish, Gypsy or Irish Traveller and Any Other White Background. Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi are three separate ethnicities, on grounds I cannot understand. Are Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands different on ethnic grounds, or just historically so?

Black Caribbean, I see, is not the same as “Black and White Caribbean” and the word “Arab” covers up a multitude of hostilities, religious and territorial. I wouldn’t say it aloud in my Iranian grocer’s store. Most shocking to my eye, however, is that, among 18 dominant ethnicities in the arts of England, there is no designation on the form for a person of Jewish ancestry.

If Jews are not ethnic, what are we? We come from all over the world with a religion that divides us rather than unites and a civilisation that is more distinct and diverse than any other on the list. Yet, when it comes to dishing out Rishi’s dosh, Jews are the ethnicity that dare not speak its name.

A gentile friend who knows the official mind better than I do says “well, Jews come under Any Other White Background”, but we don’t, do we? There are Jews whose skin is darker than Wiley’s and whose music is way out of harmony with European tonality. There are Jews of every tongue and nation, every shade of Jewish opinion. The refusal to recognise Jews as an ethnic group is an act of blatant prejudice, and it may run deeper than we think....

Well, as Wiley knows, Jews are all wealthy lawyers, exploiting artists of other ethnicities. No subsidy needed for them....

Against our code of acceptance for advertising in our stations

An advert reading ‘I ♥ JK Rowling’ has been removed from Edinburgh Waverley station.

Well of course it has. Clearly transphobic...

[Photo: Times photographer James Glossop]

Stephen Daisley in the Spectator:

The ad was taken out by Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a women’s rights campaigner better known as Posie Parker, who paid for a billboard in Liverpool during the 2018 Labour Party conference which read ‘woman: adult human female’. That was removed, too. Her latest display doesn’t quote anything as wildly controversial as the Oxford English Dictionary. It simply expresses affection for the Harry Potter author. So why has it been removed?

A Network Rail source has told the Times the ad was deemed ‘likely to cause offence' because of Rowling’s belief that women are a sex class with legal rights rather than a gender identity that can be opted into. The left-wing author — you know, proper left-wing: wants to change more than just pronouns — has been routinely assailed for stating a view that until recently was almost universally accepted, and in the process has been hung out to dry by middling actors who would be teaching drama at their local comp right now if it weren’t for her.

Network Rail tells the Times:

“‘The poster in question is against our code of acceptance for advertising in our stations owing to its political nature. We do not allow advertising that is likely to support or promote one viewpoint over another.’

The company’s code of acceptance for station advertising excludes material that is ‘of a political nature calling for the support of a particular viewpoint, policy or action or attacking a member or policies of any legislative, central or local government authority’. If ‘I ❤ JK Rowling’ is ‘of a political nature calling for the support of a particular viewpoint’, one wonders what Network Rail would make of someone displaying LGBT Pride banners across the nation’s rail estate. All these banners carry the branding of the same company: Network Rail. You might not consider promoting Pride as political but, if it’s not, under what bizarre standard is expressing admiration for a Scottish children’s author?

As Jo Bartosch points out, the advert was a clever move. Network Rail had a choice: keep the ad and brave the trans activist storm, or remove it and look ridiculous. Well, they've removed it, and yes, they look ridiculous.

The strategy of Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (aka Posie Parker), the brains behind Standing for Women, is a smart one. By placing simple statements in public spaces, she has exposed the hyperbolic claims and bullying tactics of the online mob to the less flattering light of the real world. Following bans from Twitter, Facebook and ‘Mumsnet’, she explained on her podcast that Standing for Women’s approach is to ‘take back the public square’. For Keen-Minshull, who has been censored online, ‘real life interaction’ gives her ‘a chance to breathe’. She explained to me: ‘I hope the general public can see the weight of woman hatred behind this censorship. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.’

It would be disingenuous to pretend there isn’t a message underpinning the ‘I ♥ JK Rowling’ statement, but arguably it is no more political than the rainbow flags which now bedeck public buildings during what has become the ‘LGBTQ+ Pride season’.  [...]

The outrage prompted by a simple advert shows there are some people who seem to expect the real world to work like social media, where if something offends you it can be blocked or deleted. At present, for the most part this holds true, with statutory bodies, private companies and universities abasing themselves over accusations of wrongthink and begging for forgiveness. But as the demands of the social-justice mob become further detached from reality, there will come a point where this is unsustainable. By pandering to the escalating tantrums of perpetually offended transgender activists, companies like Network Rail risk losing credibility. Finally it seems ordinary citizens are waking up to the offline reality of online identity politics – let’s hope Scotland gets the memo before articles like this one become criminalised.

Baubles, bangles and beads

Sarah Vaughan, live in Sweden, 1964. Classy as ever:

With Kirk Stuart (piano), Charles "Buster" Williams (bass), and Georges Hughes (drums). 

I think we need some help from Wikipedia here:

"Baubles, Bangles & Beads" is a popular song from the 1953 musical Kismet, credited to Robert Wright and George Forrest. Like all the music in that show, the melody was based on works by Alexander Borodin, in this case the second theme of the second movement of his String Quartet in D. The "Kismet" setting maintains the original's 3/4 waltz rhythm; pop music settings change the rhythm to a moderate four-beat accompaniment. Jazz musicians are especially drawn to the song's beguiling melody and advanced harmonic structure. The familiar AA'BA+Coda structure of the song is energized by a key change up a major third interval for every section; the transition is marked by a bracing harmonic progression from the central major key of one section to the tritone minor key of the following section. Jazz players and singers have enjoyed the musical challenges of this song for decades.

The best-selling version of the song was recorded by Peggy Lee on September 16, 1953...

And here is Ms Lee, from 1959. More on the louche side, I'd say.

Green, brown, blue

From the Underground bridge over the algae-covered Lea near Bromley-by-Bow, down Bow Creek to Cody Dock and Joanna Rajkowska's blackbird egg, with views to Docklands and the new Leamouth Peninsula development, then back via the Twelvetrees Gasholders:

Were there any salient points?

The Voice - "Britain's Favourite Black Newspaper" - has a strange interview with Wiley: "Arguably the most recognisable face in Grime history has been banned from all social media platforms for spouting Anti-Semitic views, police have been to his house, investigations and legal proceedings are ongoing. But within his ranting were there any salient points?" Hmm.

He knows he articulated himself poorly, he also knows that is no excuse for what he describes as mixing “ignorance with truth and fact”, but Wiley is adamant, and he’s not alone in his thinking, that there is an unspoken systemic oppression that blights the lives of young black creatives in the entertainment space.

So, who is doing the oppressing?

Well yes - it's the Jews.

These questions were not being posed from an ignorant perspective, some of the views espoused by Wiley are the great unsaid outside of the black community.

Putting anything remotely near considered Anti-Semitic to one side of course, in fact out the window in the bin, not too many seem prepared to vocalise their consternation for some of the recurring themes Wiley believes is the stranglehold one community seems to have over another in particular relation but not confined to, the music business.

The "great unsaid outside of the black community"?? The unpleasant implication is that it's only a courageous few in the Black community, like Wiley here, who have the guts to speak out about the exploitation by Jews of young Black artists.

Both Wiley, and perhaps the Voice interviewer here, have drunk too deeply of the Farrakhan poison.

Lee Harpin at the JC:

[I]nstead of challenging the 41 year-old artist, who has now been banned from Twitter and Facebook over his racist views, journalist Joel Campbell - arts and entertainment editor of The Voice - asks: "within his ranting were there any salient points?"

Mr Campbell then suggests Wiley is "not alone in his thinking, that there is an unspoken systemic oppression that blights the lives of young black creatives in the entertainment space."...

Then, claiming to have put "anything remotely near considered antisemitic to one side", the journalist writes that "not too many seem prepared to vocalise their consternation for some of the recurring themes Wiley believes is the stranglehold one community seems to have over another in particular relation but not confined to, the music business."

Later in the article, Mr Campbell writes: "There is no way to put this all in one nutshell but the hypothesis that you need to get a Jewish lawyer in order to progress in the music business may be a complete fallacy (I haven’t done the numbers, looking into the correlation in respect of who is and isn’t successful with or without one), but yet it remains.

"I’ve never seen anyone Jewish refute or confirm this (maybe there was never a need felt to do so), but maybe, it’s a discussion that needs to be had?"

Really? 

At one stage in the interview Wiley suggests "Slavery hasn’t stopped it’s just dressed up in a million pound record deal.”
 
Questioned over what his issue with the Jews he has worked with is, Wiley then tells the newspaper: “The things that need to change is the way that the system was set up, why all of these families are rich, or all of these people have heritage, not just England, like, worldwide.”

“They still see us as slaves. Slavery hasn’t stopped it’s just dressed up in a million pound record deal and it’s dressed up in trainer deals, nice shoes and it’s dressed up as come over here …."

Complaining that even successful black artists "making these people millions and trillions, and then at the end of the black kids career he hasn’t even got a property" Wiley adds, "they have got ten properties and this and that and their kids have got wages to go to school forever. It’s set up so that they win and we lose.”

So "Britain's Favourite Black Newspaper" publishes an interview in which Wiley is allowed to repeat his antisemitic slurs, and they can't manage any sort of rebuttal. In fact they wonder if perhaps he's on to something. "Maybe, it’s a discussion that needs to be had?" 

That, to put it mildly, is disappointing.

Back at The Hill

Roses and hydrangea up in Hampstead:

Structural racism within the Sudanese state

A BBC feature - Viewpoint from Sudan - where black people are called slaves:

As anti-racism protests swept through various parts of the world following African-American George Floyd's death in police custody in the US, Sudan seemed to be in a completely different world.

There was little take-up in Sudan of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Instead many Sudanese social media users hurled racial abuse at a famous black Sudanese footballer, Issam Abdulraheem, and a light-skinned Arab make-up artist, Reem Khougli, following their marriage.

"Seriously girl, this is haram [Arabic for forbidden]... a queen marries her slave," one man commented on Facebook after seeing a photo of the couple.

There were dozens of similar comments - not surprising in a country where many Sudanese who see themselves as Arabs, rather than Africans, routinely use the word "slave", and other derogatory words, to describe black people.

Sudan has always been dominated by a light-skinned, Arabic-speaking elite, while black Africans in the south and west of the country have faced discrimination and marginalisation.

It is common for newspapers to publish racial slurs, including the word "slave"....

In another recent instance, the head of a women's rights group, No To Women Oppression, commented on a photo showing a young black man with his white European wife by saying that the woman, in choosing her husband, may have been looking for the creature missing on the evolutionary ladder between humans and monkeys.

Following an outcry, Ihsan Fagiri announced her resignation, but No To Women Oppression refused to accept it, saying she did not mean it. [...]

Racism is insidious in Sudan, historically and since independence when most senior positions have been filled by people from the north - the Arab and Nubian ethnic groups.

Almost all senior military officers are from these communities, which has also allowed them to use their influence to dominate the business sector.

Today if you go into any government department or bank in Khartoum, you will rarely see a black person in an important role. [...]

Slave traders are still glorified - a street in the heart of the capital is named after al-Zubair Pasha Rahma, whose 19th Century trading empire stretched to parts of what is now the Central African Republic and Chad.

Historians say he mainly captured women from the modern-day Sudanese areas of Blue Nile and the Nuba Mountains, as well as South Sudan and Ethiopia's Oromia region. He was also known for his slave army, made up of captives from South Sudan, which fought for the Ottomans.

Another street is named after Osman Digna - a slave trader and military commander, whose lucrative business was curtailed by the then-British colonial administration when it moved to outlaw slavery.

The practice was only officially abolished in 1924, but the decision faced strong resistance from the main Arab and Islamic leaders of that era, among them Abdelrahman al-Mahdi and Ali al-Mirghani, who many believe had slaves working on the vast tracts of land they owned along the Nile River.

And so on...

Remember Darfur? Where the pro-government Arab Janjaweed militias arrived on horseback in black African villages, killing the men and raping the women? For which the then president Omar al-Bashir was prosecuted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide? That all came to nothing. And it's still going on...

Little has changed there in the last year, with reports of rapes and village burnings continuing despite the peace talks organised by the power-sharing government, which is leading the three-year transition to civilian rule.

The transitional government was formed by the military and the civilian groups that led the 2019 revolution, but it is unclear whether it is genuinely committed to tackling the structural racism within the Sudanese state.

North London colour

Terraces in Kentish Town, Camden, and Primrose Hill:

The ‘Transgender’ phenomenon

It was only quite recently that the term "gender" was taken from the grammar textbooks and began to be used as a polite synonym for sex. If an official form asked for ‘sex’, people would jokingly add a box with “yes please!”. Gender was better....nicer. Then it came to mean the social expression of sex - the behaviours deemed appropriate or "normal" for men and women. This is what feminism was, amongst other issues, campaigning against. 

Now it's taken on a life of its own as some mystical force akin to a soul, but coming in two forms instead of one - male or female. And it may or may not correspond to one's actual sex. 

Kamala Iyer, in Sex, Lies and Mutilation – The ‘Transgender’ Phenomenon, makes some basic biological points:

Sex or sexual dimorphism precedes humans by millions of years. Sexual development – not to be confused with sex itself – in humans is determined by chromosomes, which are the gold standard of testing for it. The Y chromosome alone determines your sex. XX – healthy female, XY – healthy male. DSDs (disorders of sexual development) are rare and exist, but all human beings have a sex. For example, a person with Klinefelter’s Syndrome XXY is still male. And a person with Turner’s Syndrome – XO, is still female.

What is ‘intersex’? Trans activism often conflates intersex with transgender as a way to prove that sex is a spectrum. It is not. However, for intersex people, due to hormone issues, the phenotype (physical appearance) often does not exactly match the genotype (X and Y). All intersex people have a sex, and often do need surgeries and hormone therapy. It has nothing to do with hermaphroditism either; that is definitely not a word to use for people, as it is offensive and misleading.

One thing to remember moving forward – nobody is born in the “wrong body”. Everyone gets the one body with one mind to work with, and that is all you have. Gender dysphoria is a mentally-disordered mind in a healthy body. The trans industry wants to convince you of the opposite, audacious and staggering lie – that trans kids are not suffering from a mental health issue, and it’s their little bodies that are abominations.

Iyer then takes a closer look at the eight criteria used by the Boston Children’s Hospital, and shows why they're such a cause for concern:

These criteria for gender dysphoria are subjective and deliberately vague, backwards, and give free reign for predatory agents and groomers to step in. To re-iterate: Sex is binary. Gender is a social construct. All people have a sex. Dysphoric children must be urgently protected from the vultures in a particular section of the medical sector that pushes transgender people as patients for a lifetime.

We in the UK, of course, have our own issues with the troubled Tavistock Centre, and the trans activist charity Mermaids.

As I said of trans activism a few weeks back:

It's now reached the level of a cult, dwarfing the repressed memory movement of the 1980s and 90s. Back then, so the line went, if you were a young girl with problems and depression and low self-esteem, it was very likely down to sexual abuse you experienced as an infant. Head off to a therapist, and - at considerable expense - they'd sort you out by drawing forth those early repressed memories. Now...well, you must have gender dysphoria. Just pop these puberty blockers, take some testosterone, and we'll see if we can schedule you in for the surgery....mastectomy to start with, and then maybe the serious stuff downstairs.

So back then it was just your mind they were messing with: now it's your body too.

It's all thoroughly regressive: that's what's so extraordinary about the whole business. The term "gender dysphoria", presented as a medical condition, is in effect a term for people who have a problem with gender stereotypes, but given a scholarly scientific-sounding name. The answers provided by feminism and gay rights - that gender stereotypes need to be challenged and dismantled - are dismissed by a new jargon which now presents this as an issue requiring medical intervention. 

It's a kind of return of the repressed - misogyny and homophobia come back in new progressive clothing.

Less than persuasively executed

The issue of the comfort women - basically, Korean women forced by the Japanese to become their sex slaves during the period of Japanese imperialism before and during WW2 - continues to poison relations between the two countries. The issue had supposedly been settled:

On December 28, 2015, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye reached an formal agreement to settle the dispute. Abe again expressed his most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women and acknowledged that they had undergone immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women. He stated that Japan continued to hold the position that issues relating to property and claims between Japan and the ROK, including the issue of comfort women, had been settled completely and finally by the Japan-ROK Claims Settlement and Economic Cooperation Agreement of 1965 and welcomed the fact that the issue of comfort women is resolved “finally and irreversibly” with this agreement. Japan agreed to pay ¥1 billion (₩9.7 billion; $8.3 million) to a fund supporting surviving victims while South Korea agreed to refrain from criticizing Japan regarding the issue and to work to remove a statue memorializing the victims from in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul...

But many of the comfort women and their descendants are not happy with what they claimed was a rushed settlement, made without their agreement. And any specification that South Korea should agree to refrain for all time from criticizing Japan regarding the issue is manifestly unjust - and unrealistic.

And now:

Japan has formally protested against a sculpture in a privately owned botanical garden in Korea that represents Prime Minister Shinzo Abe prostrating himself in front of a World War II sex slave.

The botanical garden has now canceled the official unveiling of the sculpture scheduled for next month.

After Japanese news media picked up the story on Sunday, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said, "If the reports are accurate, then there would be a decisive impact on Japan-Korea relations."

The work, entitled "Eternal Atonement," adorns the Korea Botanic Garden in Pyeongchang, Gangwon Province.

[Photo: Yonhap]

Wang Gwang-hyun, the sculptor, said, "The work urges [Abe] to reflect on his reluctance to apologize for the forced colonization of Korea and the comfort women issue," the euphemism for the sexual enslavement of Korean and other Asian women for the Japanese Imperial Army in World War II.

The conservative Sankei Shimbun on Tuesday said the statue is drawing criticism even within Korea for "diplomatic discourtesy" and for being "childish."

The gold-colored installation is less than persuasively executed, and there has been some head-scratching here why it would spark threats of a "decisive impact" from the top of the Japanese government given that the park is in private hands.

The Foreign Ministry here only said that Japan "appears to be worried about international discourtesy toward the leader of another country."

Very touchy on this, the Japanese.