Mick Hartley

The Faroe Islands

Images from photographer Lazar Gintchin:

[Images © Lazar Gintchin]

A hero of the year

I missed this on Sunday, but it's kind of nice that it should feature as a lead item in South Korea's Chosun Ilbo:

The Sunday Times of the U.K. selected North Korean defector and rights activist Park Ji-hyun on Sunday as one of its 20 "heroes of 2021."

The British daily said Park "arrived in Britain 14 years ago, survived a North Korean labour camp and two failed attempts to escape. The mother of three has helped fellow North Korean defectors adapt to living in the U.K."

"She became the first North Korean to be a political candidate in the U.K. when she ran to be a Tory councillor in May… She lost, but she inspired many," it added.

The Sunday Times selects as its heroes people who "made achievements in public life" and "committed themselves to serving and helping Britain."

Born in Chongjin, North Hamgyong Province, Park settled in Manchester in 2008 after being recognized as a refugee.

I featured Jihyun Park, as she calls herself here, in a couple of posts earlier this year.

Collapsed in their home due to starvation

A glimpse into hardship in North Korea from the Daily NK:

The family of a former military officer was recently found collapsed in their home due to starvation in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province, Daily NK has learned.

According to a source in the province on Dec. 17, the family was found collapsed in their home on Dec. 10 by the group leader of their local inminban (people’s unit).

The head of the family, surnamed Chae, had worked as a military officer on the “frontlines” in Kangwon Province for around 10 years. After leaving the military in 2017, he returned to his hometown of Hoeryong with his two children. He began selling alcohol and food to make a living as that kind of business does not require much money to start.

The family faced a severe threat to their livelihood, however, when North Korean authorities began their “no stone left unturned” crackdown on street and alleyway businesses. The family was caught up in crackdowns by local police and inspection teams every time they went out to the streets to sell food, and their business gradually began to suffer as a result.

Last month, for example, the family went out to the streets with cooking oil and stove to sell ggwabaegi (Korean-style twisted bread sticks). Most days, however, they were unable to earn any money at all because of crackdowns by local police and inspection teams. More recently, despite further attempts to sell ggwabaegi, they failed to sell what they had made on a daily basis, putting them further into debt.

Chae’s family was soon left with nothing more to eat before they were discovered collapsed due to hunger in their unheated home.

After the group leader of their inminban found them, the family’s situation was reported to the head of the local inminban. The inminban head proceeded to hold a meeting where she called for every member of the organization to donate whatever they could, “even 100 grams of rice, corn, or anything else that can be eaten.”

Each family in the inminban went on to donate 1.5 kilograms of rice, two kilograms of corn, and one kilograms of corn soup to Chae’s family. According to the source, Chae and his family are now eking by with the food they received from their neighbors.

“The family of a former soldier – someone who should receive protection from the government – almost died of starvation,” the source told Daily NK, adding, “The family is surviving with food from the inminban, but the situation is still unfortunate because it’s unclear how they’ll survive after everything has been eaten.”

The regime cracks down on street vendors - the only means that people like these can make a living - and provides nothing in return beyond a stream of sycophantic propaganda about the love that the glorious Kim dynasty holds for its people.

This scenario must surely be commonplace now throughout the country as winter starts to bite.

Stonewall's year

Jo Bartosch looks back at a bad year for Stonewall:

’Tis the season of goodwill, a time to think of the less fortunate. So, dear reader, I ask you to turn your attention to poor Nancy Kelley, the chief executive currently balanced at the top of Stonewall’s rickety Christmas tree. 2021 has been something of an annus horribilis for Kelley as the big beasts in journalism and politics have begun to follow the trail against Stonewall laid by gender-critical campaigners.

As head of Stonewall, Kelley has been expected to perform a miracle more astonishing than the virgin birth. She has been tasked with convincing the British public that straight men can turn into lesbians by saying the magic words ‘I identify as’. This is because Stonewall’s insistence that ‘transwomen are women’ has opened the door for everyone from bepenised pantomime dames to Eddie Izzard to claim to be lesbians....

This year Stonewall’s reputation has crashed to the ground, and the noise has reverberated across Whitehall and throughout civil society. 

The first major blow to Stonewall came in May, with the publication of the Reindorf report, an independent investigation into the No Platforming of feminist academics by the University of Essex. Along with over 100 universities, Essex had been paying money to Stonewall for guidance on its equality policies. But the report found that Essex had adopted policies which reflected ‘the law as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is’. Significantly, the report advised that should the university continue with its membership of the Stonewall scheme, it had better ‘devise a strategy for countering the drawbacks and potential illegalities’.

This brought national attention to the Stonewall Diversity Champions programme, whereby organisations pay upwards of £2,000 to allow the charity to vet their internal equality policies. Stonewall had proudly boasted of having 850 members of the scheme. But it removed the membership list from public view on its website earlier this year (though an email inquiry revealed that there were 695 members as of January 2021)....

The first public body to quit Stonewall was the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Other quangos and government departments rushed to follow suit, including the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health, Ofcom and the Crown Prosecution Service. Equalities minister Liz Truss advised that all government bodies should officially withdraw from Stonewall. This put her at odds with Boris Johnson’s special adviser, Henry Newman, who is known to be best buddies with Carrie Johnson and a keen advocate for Stonewall.

Criticism has not just come from campaigners and politicians. This year a number of the charity’s founders spoke out against its focus on transgender rights and its intolerance of dissent. Co-founder Simon Fanshawe accused Stonewall of being ‘entirely devoted to political conformity’. Columnist Matthew Parris, another co-founder, added his voice, arguing that the ‘organisation is tangled up in the trans issue, cornered into an extremist stance on a debate’ that it ‘should never have got itself into’....

When Kelley was finally asked questions by journalists on trans issues, the answers to which ought to have been within the wit of a six-figure salaried chief executive, she was pitifully underprepared. Her most memorable media performance was an interview with BBC LGBT correspondent Jessica Parker. Kelley compared ‘gender-critical beliefs’ (ie, that there are two sexes and that sex cannot be changed) to hatred and prejudice against Jewish people: ‘With all beliefs, including controversial beliefs, there is a right to express those beliefs publicly, and where they’re harmful or damaging – whether it’s anti-Semitic beliefs, gender-critical beliefs, beliefs about disability – we have legal systems that are put in place for people who are harmed by that.’

She repeatedly resorted to this tactic of comparing gender-critical beliefs with bigoted extremism. A leaked email Kelley sent to a BBC boss revealed that she had argued that being exclusively attracted to someone of the same sex was akin to ‘sexual racism’. The email was part of an apparent attempt to prevent the publication of a BBC article that focused on the experiences of lesbians who had been sexually harassed and, in one case, raped by men who identified as both ‘transwomen’ and lesbians.

Perhaps the most damaging episode for Stonewall was a 10-part BBC podcast series, Nolan Investigates: Stonewall, which explored the influence of the charity on policies within a range of British institutions. Released in October, the series sparked renewed interest in the relationship between Stonewall and the BBC. A month later, the BBC announced it was severing ties with Stonewall, citing the risk of ‘perceived bias’.

Next year a court case could smash a wrecking ball through the remains of Stonewall’s reputation. Barrister Allison Bailey is suing the charity. Her case accuses Stonewall of colluding with her employer, Garden Court Chambers, and encouraging it to investigate her for expressing gender-critical beliefs. One suspects anyone left at Stonewall with sense will be spending the festive season job hunting.

Today, Stonewall has all the appeal of a gin-soaked, handsy uncle puckering up under the mistletoe. Those watching the charity’s pantomime antics throughout the year are now ready for the curtain to come down.

There are a few organisations still listening to Stonewall's "be-progressive-and-inclusive" siren call, like the judiciary - as we heard yesterday.

CEO Nancy Kelley, meanwhile, continues her tone-deaf approach to public relations by appearing on al-Jazeera with transwoman Christine Burns to explain "how Britain had lost its head over a trans panic" - "It was such a pleasure doing this Upfront programme with Christine  An absolute breath of fresh air to talk about transphobia in the UK without having to address eleventy billion bad faith arguments, and even better to do it alongside such an expert!".

Homosexuality in Qatar, home of al-Jazeera, is illegal, with a punishment of up to three years in prison and a fine, and the possibility of the death penalty....a point which Kelley, head of what purports to be the UK's leading LGBT rights organisation, chose not to address.

Update: Debbie Hayton in the Spectator with more of the same - Stonewall’s annus horribilis:

Through its Diversity Champions Programme, Stonewall advised businesses, police, NHS Trusts and universities. Yet during the last twelve months, the wheels fell off the wagon: high-profile organisations sought to distance themselves from Stonewall; even the BBC opted to cut ties with the charity's workplace equality scheme.

This reckoning was overdue: for too long, Stonewall has been on something of a trans-crusade. In doing so, it prioritised the T over the LGB. 'Acceptance without exception for trans people,' was one of its slogans. If that’s as far as it went, there would be no problem. But Stonewall has been pushing an ideology that goes much further: the promotion of gender identity over and above biological sex. 2021 is the year where the tide turned....

Forgotten Jewish refugees

Because they need to be remembered:

Why forgotten?

Because it doesn't fit the story of a Jewish state consisting of European settlers displacing native Palestinians.

Because, contrary to Arab and Muslim claims, Jews have always been a significant part of the Middle Eastern world.

Because the Palestinians weren't the sole victims of ethnic cleansing in the 20th century, or even the most numerous. But they're the only ones who are still classed as refugees, and have a whole UN agency, employing over 30,000 people, looking after their interests.

Because it suits the Arab world to keep the Palestinians as refugees, rather than making any effort to incorporate them - despite all the talk of Arab nationalism....

 

Sucking his thumb throughout

Here's an interesting case for the judges to ponder:

A 60-year-old pedophile who claims to identify as a 5-year-old girl was found to have been in breach of his child sexual harm prevention order after he approached two little girls and kissed them.  

Janiel Verainer, of Chatham, UK, was found by the court to have breached a sexual harm order imposed in 2016 after he was found kissing a small girl outside of a cafe in Thanet, UK. At the time, child sexual exploitation images were also found on Verainer's devices. Verainer was sentenced to 15 months in prison, and the sexual harm prevention order – one requiring he stay away from all children – was implemented.

But over the last year, Verainer repeated his offence, this time approaching two little girls and kissing them.

During the hearing for his violation, Verainer was dressed like an elf, wearing a green and red dress, red and white thigh-high stockings, and a festive sweater. He was allegedly sucking his thumb throughout.

At a previous court appearance for his 2016 abuses, Verainer had adorned pig-tails and had been sucking on a pacifier, later also having a large stuffed doll.

In both instances, he had been referred to by "she/her" pronouns by the court, after stating he identified as a 5-year-old girl.

Happily, the offender was allowed to sit next to a helper in the public gallery rather than in the dock at Maidstone Crown Court....him being a five-year-old girl and all.

It would surely be appropriate in this case - given the priority that must be given to identity claims - to place the offender in a nursery, where he'll be with young children of his own age.

Our choices in Afghanistan

Rory Stewart knows Afghanistan well. This, in the Spectator today, is worth a read:

In 2001, I spent part of a hard winter in a remote village near Bamiyan in the Afghan central highlands. The Taliban government had just fallen. The village was ringed with landmines. Neighbouring village had been razed to the ground by retreating militia, the roof-beams were charred, the buildings empty, and the survivors had fled to refugee camps in Iran. There was no electricity, no schooling for girls and little for boys. The nearest clinic was three days’ walk away and there were no medicines when you reached it. People made what little cash they had from archaeological looting and child labour.

When I returned to the valley, at the end of last year, it was difficult to recognise the place. For a start, I could drive there, rather than walk, on new roads that had been run up the valley. The mines had been cleared. The villages were three times larger. The refugees had returned. The lights worked. And girls were not only attending school – a number had graduated and gone on to Kabul University. Even more strikingly, carpet-weaving had moved from a dismal, low-paid activity, with a lot of child labour, in dark mud rooms, into weaving centres, with creches, producing extraordinary contemporary designs for top American stores.

We weren't wasting our time there, in other words. Progress was clear and obvious - though it was something we very rarely heard about, since the press focus was on painting the whole enterprise as yet another disastrous and profligate Western intervention.

But then we threw it all away.

And now everything has collapsed again. In just a few months, the electricity has ceased, the clinics have no drugs, the weaving centres have closed, the girls are no longer in university (Kabul University itself is shut). And the valley, reeling from a summer’s drought, now faces starvation. The lights in rural Afghanistan are going out village by village.

Some of this is the fault of the Taliban. But much of the blame lies with the failure of the US, the UK and its allies to sustain basic humanitarian and development assistance since the withdrawal. This begins with the freezing of Afghan government assets, and the cut to the almost half of the Afghan budget once provided by foreign governments. It extends also to NGOs. The US, British and European Development agencies are reorienting programs away from support to Afghan exports and businesses. The European Union is focusing on humanitarian assistance. And the US State Department has already cancelled a number of existing contracts with NGOs, demanding the programs are wrapped up, and money refunded. Meanwhile, international non-profits and UN agencies with deep knowledge of Afghanistan, a proven record of running good programs, and tens of thousands of experienced Afghan staff in place are starved of resources.

Why are we behaving like this? For some it is a response to humiliation – a desire to punish Afghanistan for spurning us. Others want to believe that the Afghans ‘chose the Taliban’ and therefore poverty, (although no-one voted for the Taliban and the idea that a woman in Kabul, somehow supports them, because she was unable to prevent an armed group from seizing her city, is grotesque).

Diplomats fantasise that by threatening to allow starvation, we will somehow change the Taliban’s political leanings. This is the most bizarre idea of all. What leverage the international community had was lost when it left Bagram air-base. Nothing from South Sudan to Myanmar suggests that regimes are moved to compromise with foreign powers, because of the starvation of their own people. Trying to starve the state into submission is impractical, imprudent and above all immoral. We can and should provide support to ordinary Afghans. And we can do so through agencies and non-profits, without giving the money to the government – just as we do in fragile states all over the world.

The US Department of State have at least committed continued support to life-saving activities such as landmine clearance by extraordinary organisations such as the Halo Trust. But the UK has not. It should. Mine-clearance is an uncomplicated good. It is immediately relevant and appealing to Afghans, both as employees and beneficiaries. And it opens the roads and transit routes through which the aid must flow. It is also the right time to be doing this. There are currently three-and-a-half million displaced inside Afghanistan (600,000 displaced by the recent fighting). Now that the fighting has stopped, many of these people will attempt to return home to houses, streets and fields often littered with explosives. The UK should join the US in using this opportunity to achieve a mine-free Afghanistan.

But mine clearance and humanitarian aid are not enough. If Afghans are ever to escape the cycle of horror and humanitarian suffering, the Afghan economy must begin to grow again. And that means restoring support to sectors such as Afghan carpet production which until recently, employed one million rural women. Smart investment and support in quality control would help sustain and grow their links to European and American buyers, creating and maintaining thousands of small businesses, and the incomes and livelihoods that flow from them. But to do this, donors need not only to restore funding, but also to clear the new bureaucratic obstacles which they have put in place on supporting exports or paying export tax.

For twenty years, or more, we have viewed Afghanistan purely as a place of threat, war and oppression. And yet it is a custodian of some of the world’s most extraordinary cultural treasures – extraordinary living traditions of calligraphy, miniature painting, ceramics, woodwork, and textiles. Investing in these crafts, and in the private sector behind them is smart development economics (in the 1990s, carpets composed ten per cent of the Afghan export economy). But it also provides a sense of pride, independence and agency to Afghans. It treats them not as victims but as partners, it draws on their self-reliance and creativity and crucially it connects them to broader cultures, and a wider world, at a time of terrible isolation.

We face three choices. Starve Afghanistan of our support and guarantee terrorism, instability, and immense pressures of flight and migration. Pretend to provide assistance, while tying the aid in ever more byzantine bureaucratic restrictions, and guarantee a continuing humiliating catastrophe. Or work with the many groups already on the ground that know how to support Afghans. By doing so, we can protect some of what we valued in twenty years of partnership, and give some hope that these communities, built up with so much care, do not again revert to blackened roof beams in a desert wasteland.

Genders in court

While most organisations are busy distancing themselves from Stonewall, our courts - behind the times as ever - are moving the other way and embracing gender nonsense:

Judges have been told that they should refer to criminal defendants by the gender they have chosen for themselves.

New guidance instructs judges to consider whether alleged victims of sexual offences should be required to describe transgender defendants by the pronouns they self-identify with.

It will give rise to concerns that witnesses and alleged victims of rape, sexual offences and domestic abuse could be forced to refer to defendants as women, even if they view them as male.

Even if they know them as male, rather. And the victims should know, having been raped and abused by these be-penised men. But they'll nevertheless be required to go along with their abuser's fantasy.

Revisions to the “equal treatment benchbook”, a 540-page guide from the Judicial College, have told judges: “There may be situations where the rights of a witness to refer to a trans person by pronouns matching their gender assigned at birth, or to otherwise reveal a person’s trans status, clash with the trans person’s right to privacy.”

Lady Justice King, the Court of Appeal judge and the chairwoman of the college, described the guidance as a “dynamic document” that has become “a key work of reference” that is “admired and envied by judiciaries across the globe”.

The advice goes on to give a range of guidance to judges on modern mores, including the direction that they should “use gender-neutral language where possible”. That translates to meaning that ideally the term “businessman” should be banished in favour of “business person” and the description “postman” should be ditched for “postal operative”. The college advises judges to use the term “flight attendant” instead of “air hostess” and “chair” instead of “chairman”.

But it is the college’s advice on gender that is likely to be the most controversial. The guidance states that judges should be alert to issues about gender identity as early as possible in court hearings. It states that “in the rare circumstances where it is necessary in the proceedings to disclose a person’s previous name and transgender history, the court may consider making reporting restrictions to prevent the disclosure of this information more widely or directing a private hearing”.

The guidance also refers to advice from the campaign group Stonewall, as it states that “ideas about acceptable language are changing rapidly”.

Indeed they are, m'lud. 

You get the feeling that the judiciary, still smarting from the fallout from the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 (is it the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read"?), is desperately attempting to be modern and au fait with current mores. But, alas, they've missed the boat again.

In Queen's Wood

"Gnarled" is our word for today:

Rowling again

Today's Sunday Times has an article by Leaf Arbuthnot which is clearly an attempt to provide an even-handed account of the whole business from the viewpoint of a millennial - Why the Harry Potter generation rejected JK Rowling. Unfortunately it's not really a subject that you can be even-handed about. So:

In December 2019, she expressed her support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who was sacked after saying, among other things, that trans women are “not women”. In June last year, Rowling then retweeted an opinion piece that referred to “people who menstruate”. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” she wrote. “Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

Her tweet was seen by many fans as glib, childish and provocative, and the internet blew up. Later that month, she wrote a long essay that set out where she stands on what she archly called the “Terf wars”. (A Terf is a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” — a woman who does not believe that someone who is born a man can fully become a woman when they transition. Mostly, the term is used as an insult against people such as Rowling.)

The essay drew a line in the sand. Some Potter fans were moved by its honesty: Rowling wrote about being sexually assaulted, and implied the experience had made her fiercely protective of the sanctity of women’s spaces. Others, especially the young, were aghast. Rowling was using her platform and influence to spread paranoid ideas about trans people. She was highlighting precisely the wrong thing: the dangers posed by trans people, rather than their vulnerability to mental ill health and suicide, to bigotry, to murder.

In what possible way could Rowling be accused of spreading paranoid ideas about trans people? This is complete nonsense. The only mention Rowling made of trans people was to wish them well: "live as you want to live". She just thinks - along with the vast majority of the population, and in accordance with the real world of science and biology - that no one can change sex. 

Potter fans began describing Rowling in extreme terms borrowed from her own canon: she was Lord Voldemort; she was a Death Eater. Millennials and Gen-Zers, normally pilloried for advocating “self-care” and “kindness”, turned nasty. One requested: “Pls kill her for my 18th birthday.” Rather than defending her, Radcliffe, Grint, Watson and other Harry Potter actors soon made clear their distaste for Rowling’s views. “I want my trans followers to know that I and so many other people around the world see you, respect you and love you for who you are,” Watson said.

Among the fans still working through their disappointment in Rowling is Juno Birch, a 27-year-old trans sculptor from Manchester who grew up with the films. “Imagine the amount of trans women who have suffered abuse in changing rooms because of what she’s said,” Birch says. “All I want is just for her to leave us alone. We trans women want to live a normal life and get on with our days. The fact that somebody so powerful and rich is trying to affect our daily life is sad.” A comment by Rowling about trans women, Birch claims, “sends hundreds of people towards me and other trans women in the public eye who receive this amount of hate”.

And again with the myth that trans people are suffering some kind of uniquely appalling levels of persecution - perhaps on the grounds that if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe it - when there's absolutely no evidence of this. The only "hate" they're receiving is a refusal to accept their cherished belief that by declaring they're women they really are women.

Yes, Maya Forstater is briefly consulted:

I ask Forstater about the view that the books are about tolerance and love; that they celebrate difference, so Rowling’s wish to exclude trans women from some women’s spaces seems odd. “I see it the other way,” Forstater says. “I think the books are a story about an authoritarian capture of institutions and about the fightback of the truth.”

If the author really can't understand why Rowling might wish to exclude trans women from some women’s spaces, then she's completely failed to grasp what the debate's all about. 

I won’t be unfollowing Rowling on Twitter. Like many millennials, I’m a little bemused by her fixation on trans rights, given the tiny size of the community and the hell that trans people often go through. Being able to self-identify your gender is the norm in many countries and there’s little evidence to show natal women have been endangered. 

Where to start? Sport, prisons, rape centres. And it's not a fixation on trans rights: it's a fixation on women's rights. The point is, of course, that it's not so much the supposed threat of trans people: it's the fact that self-identifying is so clearly open to exploitation by the unscrupulous. Apart from death and taxes, the other certainty in this life is that some men will use any chance they get to take advantage of women.

Incidentally, I don't see Janice Turner's article in the printed paper. Was this Leaf Arbuthnot piece stuck in as an alternative, as being more trans-friendly?